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Three reasons why a student without a trust fund would be mad to go to university after 2012.

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1) Vince Cable said in his Commons speech that 25 per cent of graduates are expected not to pay back the increased fees at all. This is a positive spin on an appalling consequence of the act. The reason a quarter of graduates won’t pay is because the limit triggering the payback has been raised to £21,000, and then linked with inflation. A lot of students don’t find jobs as graduates that reach or pay above this limit. Many spend years out of work, or working in book shops, Starbucks and admin roles.

This is why the graduate tax is termed a “progressive tax”, in that the less you earn the less tax you pay. The Coalition government paints this as a positive, but it’s not. Interest on the capital amount is ticking up when you’re not paying it down. Linked to inflation, 3 per cent interest will be £1,200 a year. By the time you’re 30, if you haven’t begun paying it back, the interest alone has reached £16,000.

Thinking about buying a house? You’re not anymore.
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2) Lord Ashdown said: “It’s better because no student pays a penny whilst they study“. Null argument – I didn’t pay a penny either when I went to university a few years ago, I paid in the form of a loan I’m now paying back. This is an argument by the Coalition government lifted from sofa superstores. It’s called “Buy Now, Pay Later” and it’s a scam. A customer receives 0 per cent interest for three years on a creamy white elephant, and then they have to pay it back at the end of the term or face severe penalties. It’s a salesman’s con.
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3) Back to the interest. Vince Cable said a graduate earning £30,000 a year – a fantastic amount reserved only for financial and specialist graduate jobs – will pay back £68 a month. That’s 8 per cent on £9,000 (the amount above the starting limit of £21,000). Even that won’t cover the minimum interest level on £40,000 (£100 a year on £40,000). Graduates will have to make much larger contributions to pay down the debt to prevent the crushing interest rate.

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In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story. I’m recycling them here because I’ve been told it’s “NaNoWriMo”, whatever that is.

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1) Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

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2) Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

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3) Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

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4) Every sentence must do one of two things – reveal character or advance the action.

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5) Start as close to the end as possible.

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6) Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them – in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

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7) Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

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And finally:

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

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What a bleak picture Vonnegut paints of reading. It’s not all sadism, pneumonia and cockroaches – sometimes it’s tea, chocolate and comfy chairs.

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Anyway, if you are taking part in “NaNoWriMo”, remind yourself of the wise words of Vonnegut, and never, ever forget that every word you jot down is for a reader, and not for your own sense of worth. Your job is to entertain. If you’re producing rubbish work, never let anyone see it – no matter how much effort you put in.

Check out the article over at The Salon for an argument on why NaNoWriMo is an exercise in self-indulgence.

And if that’s not put you off, check out my article on how the money’s about to drain out of the book industry once piracy takes off.

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Page99test.com is a cool way for new, unpublished writers to gain feedback on their work.

At its heart is a quote from Ford Madox Ford, who said: “Open the book to page 99, and the quality of the work will be revealed to you.”

Page 99 is crucial – it’s roughly one third of the way into the book, so the story should be running at full pace, but shouldn’t be at the point where plot points are revealed. It’s a good trick when scouring for books in charity shops, although I’m more inclined to open a new book at about the page 40, just in case.

The rules are simple:

1. You sign up (which allows you to submit your own page 99, and critique others)
2. You upload page 99 of your unfinished or finished novel (taking care to scrub out any spelling errors or grammar mistakes)
3. You wait for feedback and act accordingly.

My finished, unpublished first novel is up on the site. I had input from 15 users before I took it down and re-drafted it (which unfortunately automatically deletes comments). At that point two-thirds of readers were enjoying it, and the criticism was harsh, but well-founded.

With the re-draft I have had five votes, with a 100 per cent record for readers who want to “turn the page” and read more. It feels good to hear that from unbiased readers, and it’s helping to spur on my writing.

I’m writing from a pseudonym, but the book is one I began working on and completed last year.

The criticism is invaluable, and even though the reader only glimpses a single page, some of the comments have been intuitive to the problems I have faced in writing the novel.

Criticism is incredibly important for new, unpublished writers, and aspiring authors should search for it at every opportunity. Listening to honest feedback will help to iron out mistakes, sharpen grammar points and help spot problems that the author may have missed.

The other website I recommend for aspiring writers is Reasoning With Vampires. An anonymous writer forced to read the Stephenie Meyer trilogy is now re-reading the books and pointing out every single plot issue and grammatical error she can find (there are lots). Never has learning grammar been so funny – they should use it in schools.

The ebook market looks likely to take off in 2011, and yet book publishers aren’t particularly worried.

Why? Because book publishers are like water companies which control the water, not the pipes (this analogy from the brilliant Merchants of Culture, a book about the publishing industry in the 20th century). Publishers control the content, not the form (that’s what printers do, and they will be worried). If customers want the latest bestseller on ebook rather than in print, publishers can arrange that. The pipe changes, but the water doesn’t.

So what should publishers be wary of?

Here are six straightforward reasons why piracy in ebook publishing could take off even easier than it did with Napster in music.

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1) Books are losing value: Customers think ebooks should mean cheap – no printing, no shipping, no storing, no rent and no employees. When Amazon started selling $35 hardback editions for $9.99 as ebooks, people considered this a fair price. It didn’t matter that Amazon was losing $8 on every sale. Amazon is continuing to subsidise sales of its Kindle ebooks by selling digital bestsellers at below cost price (against publisher’s wishes).

The reality is that printing and distributing is only a very small portion of the publisher’s overheads. I’ve previously linked to the breakdown costs of a print book compared to an ebook, and when you strip away author royalties, marketing, design and the publisher and retailer’s profits, the actual printing cost is only a small percentage of the sale: just $3.25 on a $25 book. Strip away printing costs and you still have a $22 ebook.

The price of a book is linked to the value of its content, not the physical cost to make it.

A book as a collection of blank pages is worth nothing (except as a notebook). When a reader buys a book, the value they are paying for is in the content, the writing, the knowledge. The value of content is undermined by Amazon charging below cost for an ebook, and the fear is that the perception of cheap ebooks will stick, and people will be unwilling to ever pay near-print price for a digital version again.

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2) Ebooks are tiny digital files, and even easier to share: Print files are much smaller even than music files. A gigabyte of space will hold maybe ten albums, putting an instant cap on illegal downloads. Ebooks will be measured in kilobytes, not megabytes, and this means people can download thousands and even millions of books at a lightning fast rate, and store them indefinitely on hard drives. Ebooks can be passed around through emails and instant messaging, or just posted in full on hosting websites. Once a book is unlocked from any digital management rights, it is gone forever.

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3) With ebooks, there’s no issue on quality: The opening weekend is incredibly important for the movie industry. Hollywood films are saved by the initial poor quality of illegal copies filmed in the cinema on handheld cameras. No-one can stand the appalling audio and visual quality of illegal movies, which provides an incentive to go to the cinema. Similarly, no-one likes listening to new music if the sound quality is bad, or if DJs are talking over the song.

Books have no variance in quality, and need no quality control. No audio problems, no visual issues. It’s just black and white text, whether it’s scanned, downloaded or photographed.

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4) Most people don’t cherish books: Some people love print books, and have the heavy bookshelves to prove it. A lot of people don’t. A lot of people read celebrity biographies, trashy crime and romance thrillers, and books about conspiracies and sports. A lot of people only read on holiday, and might leave the book in the hotel. It is to these people the ebook – or more likely the illegally downloaded ebook -  is perfect. They can take it with them, read it on the beach and the plane, and then discard it.

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5) Authors have no ancillary income: When musicians got hit by illegal downloads, the industry changed. Global and national tours became an important revenue stream for musicians and bands, and ticket prices got higher. Authors have no such fallback. When piracy hits book sales, authors will get poor. This will strangle creativity, lead to less books being published and push true talent to the sidelines.

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Print books will never leave the market,

Howard Jacobson is the 2010 Man Booker prize winner for his novel The Finkler Question. It has sold just over 3,500 copies so far.

The sales figures for the Man Booker Prize list, courtesy of The Guardian, and current as of today, are below:

Peter Carey – Parrot and Olivier in America – 5,987 – £87,426.92

Emma Donoghue – Room – 33,923 – £290,352.26

Damon Galgut – In a Strange Room – 1,210 – £15,850.87

Howard Jacobson – The Finkler Question – 3,505 – £54,614.36

Andrea Levy – The Long Song – 15,251 – £201,915.7

Tom McCarthy – C – 2,649 – £35,073.98

By comparison,the seventh and final volume of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sold 11 million copies… in its first day. This is a grossly unfair comparison, because by then Harry Potter was a major international brand, backed by investment from one of the biggest media conglomerates and with a backlist of unbelievably popular novels and films. The anticipation for the final tome was dizzying, hence the galactic sales figures.

Emma Donoghue’s Room (reviewed here) has sold incredibly well. Its subject matter is a particularly grizzly kidnapping case, and many readers will be intrigued by the concept of writing from the perspective of a five-year-old boy (I know I was).

In any case, well done to Jacobson.

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‘About the Author’ blurbs at the beginnings of novels are normally quite unrevealing and formulaic (“lives in France”, “has two children”, etc).

How refreshing the author’s blurb for Warm Bodies, by Isaac Marion, appears then.

Warm Bodies is Marion’s first novel, and the biography is self-deprecating, witty and honest. It is also inspiring writing advice for aspiring novelists. Reading between the lines:

- don’t worry about awards

- get interesting life experiences

- and concentrate on breaking through with that first novel.

Here’s Isaac Marion’s biography in full:

Isaac Marion was born in north-western Washington in 1981 and has lived in and around Seattle his whole life, working a variety of strange jobs like delivering deathbeds to hospice patients and supervising parental visits for foster-kids. He is not married, has no children, and did not go to college or win any prizes. Warm Bodies is his first novel.

Warm Bodies is a zombie romance novel, with a dedication from Twilight author Stephenie Meyer no less (check out this funny blog on Meyer’s appalling writing). Don’t let the genre put you off however, this novel is much more intelligent than the subject matter suggests.

Review will be up on Jungla soon.

If you liked this article, check out Seven tips for writing literature from V.S. Naipaul.

Roald Dahl wrote a series of letters to Peter Moulding, a banker who wrote dozens of poems and short stories in his spare time. The correspondence offered the banker some guidance that can be taken up by all aspiring writers on how to write stories that captivate the reader.

James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Tales of the Unexpected were published following the correspondence. Unfortunately Roald Dahl’s advice came too late for the banker, who was never published.

The letters appear in a new biography of Roald Dahl called Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl, by Donald Sturrock.

1) In a short story, if someone is fearful that some particular and awful thing is going to occur, then it must not occur. Something else must occur…

2) In horror stories such as this, there must, there absolutely must be a touch of humour somewhere. Laughs. Always. This is the one abiding mistake that so many writers of horrific stories make.

3) Keep on writing. I’d concentrate on the story. And make it interesting right from the word go. Give it a beginning. Then a middle. Not only an end.

4) Of critics, Dahl said: “I have nothing to do with the buggers.”

After 19 years of hints, tips and advice, he tells his friend bluntly: “I’m sure you know that you are not a natural writer in the true artistic sense of the word. You are a thoroughly literate person who writes well, which is totally different. You must know this.”

If you like this, check out Seven tips for writing from Nobel Literature and Booker Prize Winner V.S. Naipaul.

V.S. Naipaul, author of A Bend in the River and A House for Mr Biswas, and a Booker Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature winner, on how to write:

1. Write sentences of no more than ten to 12 words
2. Make each sentence a clear statement (a series of clear linked statements makes a paragraph)
3. Use short words—average no more than five letters
4. Never use a word you don’t know the meaning of
5. Avoid adjectives except for ones of colour, size and number
6. Use concrete words, avoid abstract ones
7. Practise these rules every day for six months.

Taken from Intelligent Life‘s series on how authors create their distinctive styles.

Graduates around the world are facing a hard time. A constricting job market and the “recession” means a lot of educated young people are fighting for the same jobs. On top of this, our generation struggles with apathy caused by too much TV and XBox. Graduates can’t catch a break in this modern world.

Perhaps Victor Hugo, author of Les Miserables, philosopher and 19th century hard man, has some advice to offer from beyond the grave.

In Les Miserables, Hugo creates a 17-year-old character called Marius, who is forced to fend for himself when he is thrown from his home in Paris. What lessons can young graduates take from Marius?

An excerpt from Les Miserables:

 

“Life became stern to Marius. He chewed the ‘cud of bitterness’. A horrible thing, which includes days without bread, nights without sleep, evenings without a candle, a hearth without a fire, weeks without labour, a future without hope, a coat at the elbows, an old hat which makes young girls laugh, the jibes of neighbours, humiliations, self-respect outraged (interns anyone?), any drudgery acceptable, disgust, bitterness, prostration (in front of Jeremy Kyle, perhaps?)

At the age when youth swells the heart with an imperial pride, he dropped his eyes upon his worn-out boots and experienced undeserved shame, and the poignant blushes of misery.“

 

Marius, our honorary graduate, is poor, low on confidence and stuck in a rut. Does that sound like any graduates you know? Three lessons we can take from this poor literary individual.

1) Never give up hope – and keep reading:

 

“There are many great deeds in the small struggles of life. There is a determined though unseen bravery. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are battlefields which have their heroes; obscure heroes, sometimes greater than the illustrious heroes.

Strong and rare natures are thus created; Privation gives birth to power of soul and mind; distress is the nurse of self-respect. Marius walked, an awkward young man, with books under his arm.”

2) Be careful of debt. Whilst in university you should resist credit cards and bank overdrafts:

 

“For him a debt was the beginning of slavery.”

 

3) On finding that first job, Hugo advises Marius not to settle. Time is precious, and it can be spent doing something rewarding just as easily as it can be spent doing something useless:

 

“One of the booksellers for whom he worked offered to pay him fifteen hundred francs a year. But to give up his liberty! to work for a salary, to be a kind of literary clerk! In Marius’ opinion, to accept, would make his position better and worse at the same time; he would gain in comfort and lose in dignity; it was a complete and beautiful misfortune given up for an ugly and ridiculous constraint; something like a blind man who should gain one eye. He refused.”

 

And there it is; three lessons for graduates today from beyond the grave.

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