WE all know that there's money to be made out of creative writing, even if most writers haven't acquired the knack of discovering quite how to make it. Still, given that latter fact, there's obviously money to be made out of writers, too, and with this in mind I'm thinking of copying the notion dreamed up by two enterprising English women.
Their names are Rebecca Swift and Hannah Griffiths and they're concentrating their attention on aspiring writers who can't find either an agent or a publisher willing to read their work. Rebecca and Hannah's solution to this problem is to send it instead to their Literary Consultancy, which will offer advice on every legible manuscript received.
This is how it works: if you send them three poems of no more than 25 lines each, they'll charge you £30 for their expertise and time, consideration of short stories (no more than 4,000 words) will cost you £40, while full length works of fiction or non fiction are mulled over for a mere £300.
The Literary Consultancy (which is contactable at Box 12, 26 Crouch Hill, London N4 4AU) is made up of freelance editors and writers, and my bet is that they'll be inundated with manuscripts from all those hopefuls who fondly imagine they're going to become the new Maeve Binchy, Roddy Doyle or even Jeffrey Archer.
So on second thought, perhaps I won't emulate Rebecca and Hannah's idea. Indeed, given the quantity of bad fiction that actually does get published, I tend to go along with Auberon Waugh, whose advice to anyone wishing to write a novel is: Don't do it.
ANYWAY, no less an eminence than George Steiner is pronouncing the novel finally and truly dead. Speaking at the centenary conference of the British Publishers' Association, he declared that "we are getting very tired in our novels" and that "the search is on for hybrid forms ... what novel today can compete with the best of reportage?" And V.S.Naipaul, who has abandoned writing novels altogether, has announced that the very word makes him ill.
Still, it doesn't make Salman Rushdie ill, and in the current issue of the New Yorker (a "hot summer special" in the lingo favoured by that magazine's new regime - what on earth would William Shawn say?) he offers a spirited rebuttal of Dr Steiner's thesis. The novel, he roundly declares, is "precisely that hybrid form for which Professor Steiner yearns: it is part social inquiry, part fantasy, part confessional, it crosses frontiers of knowledge as well as topographical boundaries". In other words, it's a bit like the Dublin bus timetable.
WILL John Montague's Collected Poems or Eoin McNamee's WV Resurrection Man become the first Irish winner of the Ansteoin European Literary Prize? Established in 1989 by the European Council, this is awarded for a work "which makes a significant contribution to European literature", and so far has been won by such writers as Jean Echenoz and Cees Nooteboom, of whom I'm sure I should have heard.
This year's Irish nominations were selected by a national jury under the chairmanship of Ciaran MacGonigal (Michael Longley's volume of poems, The Ghost Orchid, is one of the English nominations), and if either of them wins, the author stands to collect 20,000ECU, which in my language amounts to £16,000.
The same amount is set aside for the Aristeoin (who is this guy, anyway?) European Translation Prize, and for this the Irish Jury has nominated Gerailt MacEoin's translation of Padraic O Conaire's Deoraoicht and Maureen Charlton's version of La Fontaine's Fables.
Come September, the juries from the various countries will converge on Copenhagen, and in that current European City of "Culture the outright winners will be guests of honour for a presentation and dinner next November. My money's on the Montague.
LIAM O'FLAHERTY was born on Inish Mor a hundred years ago this August (the 28th, to be precise), and to celebrate the centenary, Wolfhound Press has just brought out reissues of three of his books - The Black Soul, The Wilderness, and a selection of stories (this last has an interesting introduction by A.A. Kelly).
That's not all. In October, Wolfhound is also publishing a lavish book by Peter Costello called O'Flaherty's Ireland, which I'm told will be distinguished by superb photographs. And furthermore, Wolfhound's Seamus and Margaret Cashman are celebrating something else this year - their publishing house is 21 years old.
ALL sorts of eminences were at Thursday evening's launch of Ulick OConnor's The Troubles (Mandarin, £7.99 in UK). This, in fact, is a revised edition of his 1975 book A Terrible Beauty Is Born, and among the revisions is the addition of a subtitle: "Michael Collins and the Volunteers in the Struggle for Irish Freedom 1912-1922." Collins is also pictured on the cover, though I'm sure the imminence of the Neil Jordan movie was the furthest thing from the publisher's mind.
Given Fine Gael's appropriation of Collins down through the decades, it may seem surprising that the politicos in attendance were Fianna Failers - Mary O'Rourke, Jim McDaid, Silo De Valera. That, of course, was because Bertie Ahern was there to launch the book, and this he accomplished with a relaxed blend of humour and seriousness. Others there to pay their respects included Patrick Mason, Tomas MacAnna, Douglas Gageby, Risteard Mulcahy, Catherine McGuinness, Proinnsias MacAonghusa, Declan Kiberd and Richard Murphy. In an amusing speech, Bill Cullen of Renault (which sponsored the book's publication) said that the author had the reputation among some of being "a crotchedy old so and so". Really? On the night he was the essence of benignity.