Bloomsbury Literary Studies

March Conference Update

Last month, our Literary Studies team attended two exciting conferences to showcase our latest releases. The American Comparative Literature Association hosted their annual meeting at Harvard University from March 17^th through 20^th. Our books were a big hit, with our eye-catching Object Lessons collection making a great display.  Attendees were excited to hear about some of our recently launched series, including New Modernisms, Literatures as World Literature, and Literatures, Culture, Translation, all of which feature cutting-edge research focused on global developments in literature and literary scholarship.

 

 

From March 31^st to April 2^nd, over 12,000 scholars, students, and writers gathered at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Los Angeles to attend panels, listen to readings, and explore the bookfair. With over 800 exhibitors, the bookfair offered an incredible range of material from publishers, journals, and literary organizations. Creative writing professors, MFA students, and curious readers alike found great new books at the Bloomsbury booth – from the writing course favorite Bending Genre and the unique handbook Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide to our always popular Object Lessons, we truly had something for everyone. Our Writers’ and Artists’ Companions offered attendees new perspectives on writing in all kinds of genres, including Literary Non-Fiction, Crime and Thriller Writing, and Historical Fiction. We loved having the chance to see our some of our authors, including fellow exhibitors Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich at the New Orleans Review booth.

 

 

Both conferences were great opportunities for the Bloomsbury team to show off the fascinating books we publish and help readers find just what they’re looking for. It was wonderful to hear so much positive feedback about our projects – we couldn’t be more proud of our Literary Studies list, and we can’t wait to bring a full range of new books to next year’s conferences. We hope to see you there!

On Writing a Guide to Poetry (Part II)

Guest Post by Mark Yakich

What is one to think of the following picture?

Is it a bit shocking? A bit adorable? Is it shockingly adorable? Whatever it is, it is the image I had initially envisioned for my book’s cover. As someone who’s been interested in design and art for a long time, I’d even made mock-up:

I’d found the image of the dead baby deer by chance on Flickr, and felt immediately that it captured a certain feeling that I have about poetry—that beauty is sometimes best displayed in the ostensibly sorrowful or awful. It’s an overly sentimental notion, perhaps, and one I associate with a famous line from Rilke’s Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies): Denn das Schöne ist nichts / als des Schrecklichen Anfang... (For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of a terror…).

As my book’s title employs the words “survivor” and “guide,” the image also brought forth the idea of the book as being somehow helpful when entering dark woods. I liked that notion both literally—one might take the book on a hike or a camping trip—and figuratively, in the sense of reading and writing a poem as an adventure into an unknown territory.

Apparently, however, the art director or designer had other ideas, most of them involving the vanishing point of a road or highway with something askew:

In the end, I am pleased with the cover we finally settled on:

And as an object, the book itself is lovely. The Rilkean aspect of the cover, for me, does not reside in the red-orange emergency cones. Rather, it’s what those cones point to: the word “poetry” and the misty white space intimating oblivion—an unknown beyond both dark woods and dark words.

 

Mark Yakich is Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA, Editor of New Orleans Review, and a poet and novelist. He is the author of Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross (2004), The Making of Collateral Beauty (2006), and The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine (2008). His latest book, Poetry: A Survivor's Guide, is now available from Bloomsbury.

On Writing a Guide to Poetry (Part I)

Guest Post by Mark Yakich

I’d wanted to call my book Poetry: A Guide for the Perplexed—not only because Bloomsbury has a series called “Guides for the Perplexed,” riffing off Maimonides’ 12th-century The Guide for the Perplexed, but because so many poems leave so many readers nonplussed—myself included.

I am not someone who devoured books as a child. In fact, I disliked books, did not enjoy reading, and found poetry to be especially irrelevant to my life...all the way up until my late twenties. But that’s not exactly why I first began writing Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide—as a means of getting people interested in poems. I wrote it chiefly for my students.

To be frank, over fifteen years of teaching poetry I’d gotten tired of repeating myself. For example, whenever my students and I would investigate certain figurative language, a question would invariably arise: What’s the difference between a metaphor and a simile? Someone would provide this answer: “A metaphor is a comparison between two unlike things. And a simile is a comparison that uses like or as.” I’d been taught this same reply in formative schooling and had learned nothing from it besides that it was a definition to memorize for a quiz. That is, simply identifying a metaphor or a simile helped me not one bit in understanding a poem. So, as a teacher of poems now, I ask a follow-up question: So why use a simile instead of a metaphor? If there’s an answer from a student, more often than not, it is: “Hell if I know.”

Here is where I employ one of my bromides:

Set aside the definitions you were given long ago, and think of a metaphor as a substitution, as in an equation: Bill is a bear this morning. In mathematical terms, “is” is “equals.” So: Bill = bear. But a simile functions a little differently. Bill is like a bear this morning. Bill ≃ bear. The substitution, or the transference, isn’t a full one.

While it may take another example or two to get across the notion of metaphor as nothing more than substitution (metaphor doesn’t necessarily have to compare “two unlike things”), students will begin to engage poetry from an angle they are unaccustomed to.

And as soon as they think they have a handle on it, I might offer the following:

If one accepts that metaphor is substitution, then what is one to do with T. S. Eliot’s proposition that “Nothing in this world or the next is a substitute for anything else”? Metaphor, that is, becomes only a pseudo-substitution. Even two identical eggs aren’t actually identical: one sits next to the other in the carton and they can be switched around, but the one is never materially the other. Metaphor is a kind of necessary deception that we accept mostly unthinkingly.

And that is precisely what reading and writing poems can help us avoid: going throughout our daily business without thinking. Because after I collected all these little strategies and personal bromides about reading and writing poems, I realized that the book I wrote wasn’t only about how to view poetry, but how to view day-to-day living. And last year while on sabbatical (away from teaching) I was able to explore and hone these thoughts into a book—a book I wish I’d had long ago when I had my first (dis)taste of poetry.

 

Visit our blog next Tuesday for Part II 

Mark Yakich is Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA, Editor of New Orleans Review, and a poet and novelist. He is the author of Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross (2004), The Making of Collateral Beauty (2006), and The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine (2008). His latest book, Poetry: A Survivor's Guide, is now available from Bloomsbury.

On Silence by John Biguenet

From Surrounded by Souvenirs of Life: A Conversation with John Biguenet by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais (The Los Angeles Review of Books, November 3, 2015)

 

How long have you wanted to write about silence? What drew you to the subject?

When I was approached by the publisher and asked if I would write a volume in its Object Lessons series, silence was the first subject I proposed. A writer spends so much of his or her life in silence, composing and reading, that it seemed an object with which I was very familiar.

Silence, in about one hundred pages (not counting notes or bibliography), delves into a wide range of topics and references — from Twain, Poe, Foucault, Kafka, and Chekhov to solitary confinement, luxury goods and experiences, sensory deprivation, punctuation, Edward Snowden’s leaks, and the Afghan practice of raising a girl as a boy when a family has no son. You also balance the personal, political, and philosophical. Is that what you were trying to do?

I wanted to create something that would mirror the life of the mind — integrating information, the testimony of others, personal experience, and then doubt about the conclusions reached. Someone has written that Silence reads like a novel. If that’s true, I would be very pleased.

One of the fascinating things about this book and about the series Object Lessons as a whole is its open-ended yet confining nature. While its topics are enormous and wide-ranging (and about things most people casually assume they understand), the short form requires the author to make difficult decisions about how to approach these subjects. Silence could have taken endless shapes. What ideas or examples did you immediately know you wanted to include? What did the short form force you to exclude? What did you wish that you’d had more room to explore?

The first paragraph of the book is about silence, but it might as well be about silence as a subject for study:

We may conjecture that somewhere in the cosmos, beyond the border of all human trace, a zone of silence awaits (always receding, of course, before the advance of future explorers), a great sea of stillness unperturbed by the animate, an utterly quiet virgin territory. But our imagination misleads us if we conceive of silence as a destination at which we might arrive.

The boundary of the subject, too, always recedes before our efforts to reach its frontiers. The deeper I descended into silence, so to speak, the more the subject expanded until there were few aspects of life that didn’t seem to depend, in some sense, on silence. I knew, for example, that I would have to address the relationship of silence to power and to religion. I could not have guessed, though, that I would write a chapter on the silence of dolls. I expected to write about torture as the antidote of silence: “For what is the purpose of torture … is it not to force stubborn silence into speech?” But I was surprised by my argument that the camera is, fundamentally, a silencer. On the other hand, I anticipated writing about the erotics of silence — examining, for example, “Murke’s Collected Silences” by Heinrich Böll in which a man records the enforced silences of “a very pretty blonde” so that he can listen to the tape in the evenings when he is alone. But the contractual word limit of my book silenced me before I could speak of such things.

 

John Biguenet is Robert Hunter Distinguished University Professor at Loyola University, New Orleans, USA. His publications include Oyster (2002), The Torturer’s Apprentice: Stories (2001), Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida (co-editor with Rainer Schulte, 1992), and Foreign Fictions (1978). He served as the first guest columnist of The New York Times (2005-2006). His latest book, Silence, is part of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series.

Some Lessons from Object Lessons

Guest post by Christopher Schaberg

Earlier this past month when I emailed the Advisory Board of the Object Lessons series to announce the release of our six latest titles (Silence, Phone Booth, Hotel, Waste, Refrigerator, and Glass), I was delighted by one common theme in board members’ responses: several of them planned to teach classes using at least a couple of the Object Lessons books.

I had been thinking about the possibility Object Lessons books assigned in college courses since we launched the series, but I never quite knew how it would play out. One early idea I had was that Object Lessons books could be adopted for “common reading” curricula, especially for First-Year Experience type programs. (Driver’s License, anyone?) It was gratifying when one of our first books, Remote Control, was picked up for an introductory media studies course—that made complete sense.

More recently, during a Reddit AMA that my co-editor Ian Bogost and I did with the current six Object Lessons authors, we got a question about teaching Object Lessons—and I began to realize the scalability and groupings of the topics within the series. For instance, Waste, Dust, Silence, and Golf Ball could be used as the basis of an environmental humanities reading group. Remote Control, Phone Booth, Refrigerator, and Glass could form the backbone of a technology studies seminar. Hood, Driver’s License, and Cigarette Lighter could provide the foundation for an American Studies course focused on everyday objects. The combinations are myriad—and we’re only talking about fifteen books so far (including the five titles forthcoming in January).

I designed one my own courses this semester around the Object Lessons series, taking a quite pragmatic approach. In my class we started with Ian’s book Alien Phenomenology, or What it’s Like to Be a Thing, and Jane Bennett’s book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. I used these two books to provide students with a sense of the intellectual background that (in part) inspired the series. I also brought in several excerpts from literary texts, examples that evince the rich lives of ordinary things in fiction and poetry. These showed us how often writers use everyday objects even when they are not explicitly trying to be object-oriented ontologists.

Then we moved into the actual series. I shared our original series proposal with my students, and we talked about what it means to edit a series of books. We and read and discussed the first four titles, and then considered Russell Jacoby’s blistering critique of the series in the Chronicle Review last April—we talked about it not only in terms of Jacoby’s theoretical positions and arguments, but also to see how we might use his more concrete feedback to refine the series moving forward. The new six titles then offered real case studies to talk about how the series has since developed and widened in scope; and we lingered on Joanna Walsh’s Hotel by way of discussing the creative potential of Object Lessons books, even within our relatively tight constraints (one thing in 25-30k words!).

Currently in my class we’re talking about the practical ends of the series—design, marketing, publicity, and review venues—as we prepare our next five titles (Cigarette Lighter, Hood, Dust, Shipping Container, and Bookshelf) for publication in January 2016. Meanwhile, my excellent and interested students are working on their own projects through which to think about the series: for example, one student is working independently on an Instagram account for the series; another has launched her own small press for poetry chapbooks, and she’s applying lessons learned about the ins and outs of publishing, drawn from our series. Other students are trying their hands at writing object-oriented essays. (Here’s an amazing essay that was written by one of my students the first time I tried this assignment, a couple years ago in a Contemporary Nonfiction course.)

But finally, all these things are not just about Object Lessons: I’m constantly reminding my students that the series is only one teeny tiny part of a vast and dynamically shifting landscape of media and publishing. This is a terrain that is continuous with literary production and consumption—topics more commonly considered the proper domain of English departments. We’re not all that far from the rest of their curriculum; in fact, we’re deep inside it, seeing and shaping how books come to life.

The Object Lessons series has given me a way to invite my students into an active field, one where texts are lively things not only to be read, but to be crafted, worked on, and realized in context. Without being too heavy handed about it, the series has become a place of praxis, where rubbery abstract ideas meet the firm road of the real, and books find their way into the hands of readers. It has also been a surprising confluence of my teaching, my research activities, and my service to the profession. I don’t think it’s a stretch to see this example as transferable: if you are editing a series of books, organizing a conference on your campus, or guest-editing a journal issue—invite your students to get involved! These sorts of collaborative activities not only give students actual skills, but they also help break down the musty and specious divisions between college and the so-called “real world.”

And the series has had a real impact on my writing, too. Reading our terrific manuscripts has reinvigorated my own fervor for inquiry, and as I work on a new book project (a third book about air travel—I know, I know!), I find myself borrowing from the keen energy and stylistic moves of our Object Lessons authors. My next book may not be an Object Lessons book per se, but I hope it will reflect the same spirit of wonder, playfulness, and critical imagination.

Since its inception, Object Lessons has been an exhilarating collaboration between scholars, editors, designers, writers, readers, reviewers, and booksellers. Inviting students into this collaborative sphere has not only been incredibly rewarding; it has also been remarkably easy, perhaps because my students recognize that this is no mere simulation or exercise—it’s something real.

 

Christopher Schaberg is Associate Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA. His latest book is The End of Airports, forthcoming from Bloomsbury. He is series co-editor with Ian Bogost of Object Lessons. For more information on the series, visit the Bloomsbury website or www.objectobjectsobjects.com. 

Object Lessons photo courtesy of Alan Pham

Hotel Confessions

Guest post by Joanna Walsh

I gave myself far too short a time to write Hotel.

I’d been working on an 85k-word manuscript over the preceding two years, and I’d promised myself I’d finish it by May, then June, then July. I’d signed the Hotel contract much earlier in the year, but I didn’t start work on Hotel ’til August had already begun. By September I knew that finishing the book for the end-of-the-month deadline was not a stunt I was going to pull, so I asked for an extension. I think I got a month, and it was enough.

Hotel is about to hit the shelves of bookshops, and where is the 85k-word manuscript? Still in the metaphorical (laptop) drawer.

A writer can be too careful with words, can handle them too cautiously. As at least a part-time Freudian, with a strong interest in Surrealism and it’s psychoanalytically-inspired games of automatic writing and exquisite corps, I’m attuned to the idea of welcoming what happens when you put words on the page, in any order you can: everything is DADA¹.

When I started writing Hotel I put everything I had on the table: not only all the material--my notes, my recollections of those Hotel years--but everything I thought I could do with structure, with voice, as well as every form I thought I’d like to write in, plus a few more I’d not considered before. The series editors didn’t blink when I put fictional characters beside real people, and mixed them up again with real people playing fictional characters (without saying which got priority). They didn’t bat an eye when I trod a line between essay, memoir, and storytelling, or when I used postcards, or screenplay. They let me quote, misquote, and use as much wordplay as I like. Which is a lot. All these devices allowed me to talk about the subjects of Hotel—marriage, desire, psychology, luxury, illness—as truthfully, and straightforwardly as I could.

Do I regret writing Hotel over a few intense months? Not at all. I couldn’t be happier with the book if I’d written it over years—and to tell the truth it did take years: years of thinking, of reading, of remembering, years of keeping silent like Freud's Dora, and finally years of learning how to write it down.

In the big, as-yet-unpublished book (which I’m revising right now) I taught myself how to write. When I came to Hotel, everything was waiting for me, and I wrote.

1 Tristan Tzara, 1918 Dada Manifesto. 

 

Joanna Walsh is a writer based in England. Her work has been published by Granta, Dalkey (Best European Fiction 2015), Salt (Best British Short Stories 2014 and 2015), Tate, and others. Her books include Fractals (2013), and Vertigo (2015). Her latest book, Hotel, is now available in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series.

On Modern Poetry and Writing the Self named Choice Outstanding Academic Titles 2013

Continuing a mulit-year streak, two Literary Studies books have been named Choice Outstanding Academic Titles for 2013. Congratulations to On Modern Poetry by Robert Rowland Smith and Writing the Self by Peter Heehs.

More about Choice Outstanding Academic Titles:

Every year, Choice subject editors single out for recognition the most significant print and electronic works reviewed in Choice during the previous calendar year. Appearing annually in Choice’s January issue, this prestigious list of publications reflects the best in scholarly titles and attracts extraordinary attention from the academic library community. The 2013 feature includes 663 titles in 54 disciplines and subsections. In awarding Outstanding Academic Title status, the editors apply several criteria to reviewed titles:

•     Overall excellence in presentation and scholarship
•     Importance relative to other literature in the field
•     Distinction as a first treatment of a given subject in book or electronic form
•     Originality or uniqueness of treatment
•     Value to undergraduate students
•     Importance in building undergraduate library collections

Writing the Self: Diaries, Memoirs, and the History of the Self traces the history of the idea of the self, in diaries, memoirs and other first-person writings, from the Iron Age to the age of the Internet.

Start reading it here:

More information


On Modern Poetry: From Theory to Total Criticism explores the divide between practical criticism and theory in 20th century criticism to propose a new way of reading poetry.

Start reading it here:

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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.

Late Walter Benjamin and On Modern Poetry - "Highly Recommended"

We were delighted to see a bumper crop of Bloomsbury titles reviewed in the latest issue of Choice, the review journal of the Association for College & Research Libraries. We were particularly delighted to receive the coveted "highly recommended" rating for not one but two of our books.

Describing the book as "at once inventive and conceptually rich", Michael Uebel of the University of Texas writes of John Schad's The Late Walter Benjamin: "This is a witty, smart novel that combines literary criticism with philosophy and local history... [It] will delight and challenge readers and admirers of Benjamin and it will intrigue anyone interested in intellectual and social history."

In a similarly glowing review of another of our recent books, On Modern Poetry by Robert Rowland Smith, R.T. Prus of Southeastern Oklahoma State University writes: "[Smith] presents a lucid, delightful approach to reading modern poetry... He brings an intense clarity to the issues, supporting his discussion with close readings of poems by Keats, Tennyson, Arnold, Hardy, Tennyson, Symons, Larkin and Prynne."

Obviously we all thought these we were great books already, but it's always nice when other people think so too. Do check out the links above if you want to find out more about either of these books.

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