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A COMMERCIAL NOVEL BREAK

What would make a qualified architect develop designs on writing blockbuster fiction? Novelist Lesley Lokko explains.

I still remember the very first time I heard the words ‘commercial fiction’ (as opposed to plain old ‘fiction,’ what I naively assumed all writing to be): It was in 1996, in a letter from an editor at one of the large publishing houses to whom I’d sent a very early draft of my first novel, Sundowners. Something along the lines of, ‘I very much enjoyed reading your first attempts at commercial fiction. However....’ Ow.

I certainly didn’t connect the books I held in my hands with anything as mundane as making a living. I didn’t know you could.

Back then, I wasn’t really aware of the dividing line between commercial and literary fiction – nor of just how strictly and hysterically the boundary was – and still is – policed. When I think about it now, I realise my ignorance probably had a lot to do with the way fiction was first presented to me. I grew up in West Africa in the 60s and 70s, where bookstores were scarce and television non-existent. Reading was our primary form of entertainment, apart from socialising, of course, for which Ghanaians are justly famous. But as the economy began to flounder in the early 70s, reading became a welcome source of distraction from the chaos of everyday life. Despite – or perhaps because of – the relative lack of choice, everyone I knew read everything, from Collins to Camus, with equal enthusiasm. We, children and adults alike, read whatever was available – commercial, comic, literary, polemic...anything that anyone who’d been abroad had managed to bring back. It sounds vaguely Stalinist and, of course, it was not. There was no ideological or formal ban in place – there just wasn’t anywhere to buy books. My father, who was a physician to the military boxing team and frequently accompanied them overseas, was disproportionately fond of medical dramas (Richard Gordon and the entire Doctor in House/Love/Trouble’ series), and biographies of leading American civil rights activists. (There’s nothing I don’t know about Cassius Clay, I promise you). My mother was a bit of a literary snob and rather liked the Russians. Nabokov, Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn. Not much fun when you’re 13. But it was my Auntie Cecilia who returned with the real prizes – Jackie Collins, Jacqueline Susann, Harold Robbins, Frederick Forsyth and – my favourite – Leon Uris. Exodus kept me occupied for nearly a month. There was something about the huge sweep of history and the epic journeys his characters undertook, coupled with a touch of romance, a hint of a thriller, a smattering of sex, written in the sort of language that a 13-year-old could not only follow, but imitate, that enthralled me. Perhaps it had something to do with the time and place we were in. Too young to be able to fully understand it, the wave of decolonization across Africa that began in the 50s in such hope and ended in the 80s with such despair, produced a strange, heightened awareness of the world and of the tensions surrounding our place within it. In the commercial fiction worlds of Uris, et al, I could both escape and identify.

But if I loved reading, I didn’t actually know anyone who was a writer, at least not personally. I certainly didn’t connect the books I held in my hands with anything as mundane as making a living. I didn’t know you could. Middle-class Africans, it has to be said, are famously competitive when describing the educational achievements of their offspring, and my father winced when I said I intended to become an interpreter. For the record, the professions rank as follows – medicine, law, engineering, accountancy, followed by anything ‘scientific.’ No one ever mentions art, which includes, I suppose, writing. I eventually became an architect, which, by virtue of its proximity to engineering, is just about acceptable, but only just. Architecture, as everyone knows, is a long, hard course. At the end of it, with a PhD finally in my hot, sweaty hands, I changed my mind and decided to become a writer instead. Double whammy (for my dad).

The decision to try my hand at fiction was almost semi-conscious, instinctive rather than planned. I went to work as an architect in South Africa for a couple of years at the tail end of apartheid, in 1992. Mandela had come out of jail and there was something of the grand scale of history à la Uris in the air. The political changes that were taking place in the country were huge and sometimes traumatic and there was plenty being said about that. But less was said about the emotional, intensely personal transformations that most South Africans were undergoing – most, not all, I should add – and, disillusioned with architecture’s inability to get to grips with such things, I decided to write about it instead.

When I came back to the UK to finish my training, writing at night and on the weekends became a form of catharsis, particularly as the genre I’d chosen – or had it chosen me? – was so very different from the overly-intellectual stuff of architectural theory. Race, politics, culture, identity...watching friends and acquaintances struggle with how to relate/love/embrace one another, observing their emotional difficulties – it was all eerily reminiscent of my childhood. My mother was Scots, my father is Ghanaian. Almost everyone I knew in Ghana as a child was similarly mixed. In fiction, there seemed to be a way out, a path towards making sense of things. After reading an article in Time Out entitled ‘How to Write a Bestseller: An A–Z’ (or something like that), I thought I’d give it a bash. A decade spent in academia was enough to persuade me that the way into a difficult subject doesn’t always have to be difficult in itself – sometimes the easiest route is through the heart, so to speak, getting the reader to care about an issue through the characters you’ve created, rather than the issue itself.

Of course, it wasn’t quite as easy as I make out, and at times it was unbelievably hard work, but there was something awfully pleasurable – and liberating – about giving it a go. At night, dipping in and out of the pool of characters I’d met and situations I’d been through in the previous two years, coupled with my memories of those earlier, epic novels, I wrote about supermodels and cocaine-snorting debutantes who criss-crossed the globe, fell in and out of love and in and out of fortunes. The backbone of that first novel – which has proved to be something of a trademark of all my subsequent novels – is the fraught romance between a white South African heiress and the black scion of a political dynasty. Looking back at it now, it seems to me that I must have been trying to recreate the world of what I now understand to be commercial fiction: ‘Malory Towers meets Desmond Tutu,’ as someone charitably described it! But without being glib about it, it has to be said that writing, any writing, is awfully hard work. Commercial fiction is largely about numbers – word count, label count, as well as sales. At an average of 230,000 words per book, each one requires stamina, as well as imagination. Since the books cover some considerable ground in terms of place and time, there’s the research that has to be done (and done well, I have to add. There are scores of people out there just dying to send you an email – or six – smugly pointing out that there is no 4th Avenue in Manhattan or that the Hilton is on the right-hand side of Park Lane, not the left).

Three of my novels were written in a single stretch in a small cottage in the Pentland Hills, just outside Edinburgh, where I wrote 15 hours a day for almost three months. I wrote in deepest winter when there was little daylight and even less heat (coming from Ghana, it was a bit of a shock, I can tell you!) Why Scotland? Because it’s very, very quiet and there’s a constant supply of electricity. Sadly, the same can’t be said about Accra. I’ve recently relocated to Hackney where it’s a bit warmer and noisier, but I’m closer to my editor, at least, which warms her heart. Finding a publisher and, often more importantly, an agent, takes time and determination. One of the best bits of advice my agent ever gave me, once it was clear we would actually get a book deal, was to think about the long-term relationship when it came to choosing a publisher – having been in the very fortunate position of being able to choose, I should add. ‘Can you see yourself with them in ten years’ time?’ she whispered out of the corner of her mouth as we walked into their offices. ‘You’ve got to ask yourself if you like them, no matter what they’re prepared to offer.’ I’m very pleased to say, five years on, the answer to both is a resounding ‘yes’!

From first thinking about it to seeing the book on the shelf, it took ten years for that first novel to come out, and in that time I learned more about the nuts and bolts of the genre I’ve chosen than I ever imagined existed. Talent (or lack thereof) aside, there’s something about the honesty of commercial fiction that I adore. Fundamentally, commercial fiction is about two things: good storytelling and good sales. Equally. Yes, reviews are important and what the fiction editor at Heat says might help put your book on the map, so to speak, but once it’s there, it’s the reading public who decide whether or not it ‘works’ (not, for example, the Booker judges), and it’s hard to argue with that. Can you tell a story in a way that keeps your reader engrossed and leaves her wanting more? The ‘more’ bit is hugely important for your publisher (and agent!) – the rest is up to you. And although the glossies would have us believe that wealth and fame are the principal motivations for writing commercial fiction (if in doubt, check out the ‘spreads’ on Barbara Taylor Bradford/Jackie Collins/Judith Krantz in any recent Hello!), the real story behind the split in our reading tastes is, as always, driven by a combination of class and culture.

I rather like the image of the increasingly blurred line between commercial and literary fiction being constantly under attack.

Good definitions of what constitutes ‘literary’ and ‘commercial’ fiction are hard to come by. Most critics waffle indecisively about the boundary between content and style, or prose and plot, and so on, citing the Booker long list as the definitive literary guide (as if everything else was simply ‘commercial’!), but if there’s one thing everyone seems to agree on, it’s the fact that the definition is slippery and shifting, and that no one seems to know whether that’s A Good Thing. I think it’s brilliant. In one of those strange, circular twists that occur from time to time, I’m reminded of one of the very first things I learned about architecture: ‘A boundary is rarely a single, straight line. It is a field, a condition, a state of mind. Boundaries exist in order to be breached.’

I rather like the image of the increasingly blurred line between commercial and literary fiction being constantly under attack. I like the sense of an ever-expanding envelope, of writers deliberately (or unconsciously) merging their genres in order to create new ones. I also read (somewhere), that one of the easiest ways for a writer to determine whether his or her work is literary or commercial is to ask the question, “Will my book be assigned reading in English courses, or will it be sold in Tesco?” For a brief moment in time, Sundowners and McEwan’s Saturday shared shelf space. In Tesco, natch. What would Ian say?

LESLEY LOKKO has spent most of her life trotting back and forth between Ghana and Britain – as well as a few other places! – and between two careers, architecture and writing. She has a PhD in Architecture from the University of London, and has built her own home in Ghana. Bitter Chocolate, her third novel, is out in January from Orion. Her previous two novels, Sundowners and Saffron Skies, were bestsellers. She is currently hard at work on her fourth. She lives in both Hackney and Accra, although not simultaneously. Her website is at: www.lesleylokko.com.

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From Issue 36 ◊ Jan/Feb/Mar 2008

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