Archive for the 'Writing & Publishing' Category

I stare out at sea from The Cobb in Lyme Regis, pondering on the illusion and reality of John Fowles’s “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” and later, meet a friendly Fossil Hunter who shows us his “catch” from the rocks of the Undercliff.

And these are the snaps:

Anna Sayburn is a journalist and online editor at the British Medical Journal. She also blogs at Dulwich OnView (which is how I got to know her) and her two blogs, Work in Progress and Bloomsbury Bluestocking, while working on her first novel. Now that’s true dedication to the craft of writing - which is why I wanted to introduce her to you all here on Fusion View who love words, writing and reading.

Here is our interview:

What is your novel about and what inspired you to write it?
The novel seems to be about things that have been buried - buried bones, buried secrets, buried treasure! I first got the inkling of an idea for it when I walked to Canterbury last Easter, with my husband Phil. Long walks seem to be very good inspiration for writing. Lots of the things and places we came across on the way have found themselves into the plot.

How are you finding the writing process?
Slow! I’ve never tried to write anything of this length before. I work as a journalist, so tend to think in terms of 350 words for a lead story, 1000 words for a feature. I’m aiming for 80,000 words for the novel. It seems an awful lot and it’s hard not to get daunted by the sheer scale. But when I actually sit down and write, it’s fine and I enjoy it. I tend to write the bones of the plot quite quickly, then have to go back and fill in the detail later.

Do you have a routine or a particular approach to the writing process?
The main challenge is to find a stretch of time when I won’t be interrupted and force myself not to do anything else! I can write for about 2 hours before I need a break, and I think I start writing rubbish after about 4 hours, so I try to stop then. In an ideal world, I’d get up early, write all morning and go out for a long walk in the afternoon. In the real world, I go to work, come home, make dinner and then switch on the laptop for a couple of hours before bed.

How does it compare to writing as a journalist or blogger?
The scale is the main difference. Plus, of course, it all has to come out of your own head, as a sustainable story. Making a coherent plot is a real challenge. I’m surprised how much I’ve enjoyed that bit. I do summaries of each chapter, and I’m about 5 chapters ahead in terms of plotting, compared to what I’ve actually written. But the time frame so different. I’ve no idea when I’ll finish the novel, while journalism and blogging are both pretty instant hits. I’ve always written fast and I tend to do blog posts in lunch hours or spare 10 minutes here and there. For the novel, I need at least a couple of hours, or there’s not much point starting.

What do you enjoy about blogging in contrast?
The immediacy of blogging is great. I can think of an idea, write it up, find a photo and post it in less than an hour. It couldn’t be more different from writing the novel. It’s also a great excuse to put off writing the novel! In fact, I’ve started a second blog, BloomsburyBluestocking, just to have more space to witter on in a non-professional manner. Trouble is, writing is addictive and the more I write, the more I seem to want to write.

Photo: Anna Sayburn, from her blog

Over on Sharon Bakar’s blog recently, she bemoaned the fact that Malaysians still did not seem to be reading. This has been a long-time issue for Malaysians as far back as I can remember. Many of us are good at business, finance, engineering, IT etc but not so many of us are world-class writers. The local publishing industry is small and focuses mainly on business and self-improvement books rather than fiction or literature. The market just isn’t there.

There appeared to be a glimmer of hope in the last few years with the rise of litbloggers in Malaysia - people who love books and reading and who blog about their passion. Many are also published as well as aspiring writers. They gather regularly in Kuala Lumpur (KL) at book events and also in writing groups, some hosted by book-lover extraordinaire herself, Sharon Bakar. But for all their literary and intellectual abilities, this seems to be a small group who, while well-respected, are not generally treated to events of pomp and circumstance with corporate sponsorship and the recognition of celebrity status - eg. in the same way that in the UK, there’s the Booker Prize dinner which is covered in the press as well as on TV.

In contrast, I’ve noticed in the last year or so that bloggers have been getting the star treatment in Malaysia in a way that seems to overshadow the book writers. Last year saw the launch of the regional Nuffnang Blog Awards to honour the best bloggers in Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and Australia . It was a glitzy, black tie affair held at a fancy hotel, apparently modelling itself on the Oscars and was even covered by the Malaysian terrestial TV channel NTV7.

Kenny Sia, who won Best Entertainment Blog, leads the Blog-Rat Pack, with his personal blog rated as the no. 1 blog in Malaysia by the global blog ranking service Technorati. He has become a celebrity through his blog which then launched him into other high-profile roles eg he was invited to be a panellist on the Malaysian X Factor like web TV show, Malaysian Dream Girls, alongside other A list celebrities. He has been named as one of the “Top 20 under 40” influential people in Malaysia by print magazine KLUE.

Nuffnang continues to play the role of star maker with its Project Alpha web TV series, which is “the first Online TV Show unveiling the real faces behind Malaysia’s Top Bloggers”. According to the blurb, “The show will take audience into various sneak peeks of bloggers’ lives, who they are, how they live, what makes them tick and where they derive their inspiration to capture the attention and interests of millions of online readers on a daily basis. The show will also try to uncover their darkest secrets which they keep hidden from their readers.” Kenny was one of the stars in Season One and the measure of the show’s success is that Season Two is now underway.

So Malaysians may not be reading books but they certainly seem to be reading blogs. My take on the rise of celebrity bloggers there is that bloggers connect with Malaysians as Malaysians. There’s no attempt to polish their English or to write in a literary way - they just write in their own voices, as Malaysians, and that is what gives them a strong connection with their readers. Their fans identify with the bloggers - their sense of humour which is typically Malaysian, their interests, their daily lives. In contrast, novels as we know them today are really a Western art form, dominated by native English speakers from the UK and US, with prizes created in the West catering to a Western taste. The West defines what literature should be. So for Malaysian writers trying to break in to that field, it is bound to be much more challenging than for writers who are comfortable working within those defined parameters. Similarly, for Malaysian readers, it can be challenging to sit down for hours on end reading about stories and people that do not speak to you or even have you in mind as an audience written by people who don’t have any real connection or feel for what your experiences might be. In my view, it’s not surprising then that bloggers have taken hold of the Malaysian imagination in such a big way.

The other thing is that there is Nuffnang taking a very active role in making the blogging stars. They are an ad/ PR agency matching blue chip global brands such as Sony, Adidas and the like with bloggers as a way of marketing those brands. There’s money in them thar blogs, so to speak. I’m not aware of any similar sort of business taking an interest in writers and in fact, the general refrain I hear (and not just from Malaysian publishers and writers but globally) is, there’s no money in books.

Here is a trailer for Project Alpha Season One:

So, is blogging becoming the new art form for Malaysians? Are the bloggerati the new literati? Should the rest of the world take the cue from Malaysian bloggers and start recognising and celebrating bloggers as the new influencers and new creatives for today’s generation?

What do you think? Have I missed something in my outline of Malaysian writers as the poor relations of Malaysian bloggers? Please let me know, especially if you have personal experience of the writing and/ or blogging scene in Malaysia.

Photos: Sharon Bakar, from her online page
Kenny Sia, thanks to KLUE

I’ve blogged a lot in the last few years about the decline of the publishing industry and how that is making it tough for novelists - especially new and budding ones - to get their works published in the traditional book market. But here’s some good news. Apparently, the one area for writers that’s booming is playwriting. According to The Guardian, “The amount of new writing produced by mainstream, subsidised theatre has more than doubled in the last six years. Many of these plays have opened in large theatres, with impressive ticket sales.”

So if you’ve been having a hard time getting your novel accepted by book publishers, maybe now’s the time to switch to writing plays.

I wonder how easy it would be for a novelist to change genres so radically. I think I’m a novelist to the core - or at least, a prose writer to the core - but I’ve also had a go at writing plays. At one time, I absolutely loved Tennessee Williams. I saw as many Williams’s plays as I could on the London stage as well as on film. I read them all and devoured biographies and letters. It was probably as much the drama and tragedy in his own life that drew me to him as his plays themselves. So, inspired by the poetry of his American South, I picked up my pen in drizzly, ol’ London and tried my hand at playwriting.

It’s quite a differenet discipline from novel writing, with the focus on dialogue and creating the drama, tension and story through the interaction of spoken language. I loved the challenge but I’m not sure I was any good at it. My stage directions were much too verbose - rather like the descriptive narrative passages you get between the dialogie in novels, strangely enough! And I included way too much detail about motivation and back story in each bit of dialogue rather than trusting that the actor and director to put their interpretation into what I had written.

Also, I found it a challenge constraining the story to a few, tight locations over a short period of time - Williams’s plays all take place in a house or apartment, building up a sense of claustrophobia - as I wanted to caper around all over the place and over a long time span, rather like a movie or the novels that I eventually published (which take place in London and several locations across Malaysia, over a time span of 10 years and more).

I had no idea how I would try to get the play publicly performed, even assuming that I managed to polish up the incompleted first draft into any semblance of readiness. Whereas there are books like The Writers Handbook and The Writers and Artists Yearbook that tell you how to get your article, story or book published in print media, it didn’t seem so easy to find out how you go about submitting a play to whoever you needed to get it to in order for it to start it’s journey towards performance. To be honest, I didn’t actually investigate it very deeply as I knew that playwriting was nowhere near a strength of mine!

I wonder also how easily a novelist would adapt to the teamsport that is theatre. We’re used to being The Author, the sole creator of the story, the sole writer of the words. Some novelists have a really hard time accepting feedback from their editors even once their manuscript has got past the various hurdles and been accepted for publication. How much more difficult would we find it taking in feedback from the director, the producer, the actors and more! And working on rewrite after rewrite - and having to face your precious words changed or improvised upon during the rehearsal process ….! Would we adapt and enjoy the creative or collaboration or would we flounce off in a huff?

I’ve never been put to the test in that way so I don’t know how I would deal with it. I hope of course that I’d rise to the team occasion. But would I?

What do you think? Have you written plays or switched between playwriting and novel writing? I’d love to hear how you handle that team side of things!

Photo: thanks to Gil Searcy from flickr.com (CCL)

I’m traumatised. I feel as if I’ve just discovered that a sweet little old auntie who used to tell me bedtime stories when I was a child had been a crazed children-devouring witch all along, hiding her fiendish cackle behind tales of jolly adventures and lashings of ginger beer.

I adored Enid Blyton as a child, like several million other kids around the world for many generations. It was because of her books that I longed to come to England and have spiffing adventures. It was her books that made me want to become a writer. I loved the spy-like antics of The Secret Seven and the jolly decent gang that was The Famous Five (though, not being an animal lover, I could never figure out why Timmy the dog counted as one of the five…). I think the Five is the series that most people remember fondly, identifying as one or other of the kids. For me it was a toss up between being Julian - oldest and in charge (read bossy) - and George, the tomboy. Dick was a bit nothingy. And never, ever, in a million years, ever girly, frilly, femmy Anne! There was also that series of books that had titles like The Something of Adventure - what’s interesting about my memory of this series is that I don’t really remember the children in it but it was the relationship between the mother and the adult male figure that caught my attention. Hmm, I wonder what that’s all about!

OK, I know, I know. Enid Blyton did not at any time devour children. But the other week, as I was watching the BBC 4 biopic of her life, Enid, I was horrified and traumatised by how casually cruel she was to her own two children - and maliciously vindictive to her first husband Hugh - while appearing in her books and in public as a charming author who was in touch with all little children all over the world.

Helena Bonham Carter plays the author with just the right mixture of childlike fragility and hard hearted coldness. Her cut glass accent sends chills down your spine as she lashes out at her poor Hugh and dismisses her children. At the same time, there is a tragic, lonely aspect to her portrayal, drawn out in close up shots of her haunted eyes.

The theme of the biopic was Enid’s almost pathological need to escape real life - and that it is this escapism that connects with her kiddy readership while at the same time destroying her ability to connect with the real people in her life. And I guess that’s why we all used to read her as kids and now as adults read other kinds of fiction - as escapes into adventure, love, comedy and so on. I know that feeling of escaping into an inner world to create fiction, too - when I was writing my two novels, I would have a sense of drifting between reality and my made-up world in my head. Sometimes, I’d be physically present and doing things and even chatting to my partner or friends but I’d be somewhere else completely. My partner, as you’d expect, didn’t like that at all.

Nor ultimately, did I. It’s disorienting and strange and it struck me that perhaps, this is how one might go mad - if the inner world became too strong or too attractive and you just gave in to it, disappeared inward altogether. All that would be left on the outside would be a body - functioning perfunctorily for awhile and then just sitting or lying and staring into nothing, while inside the dramas, the tears, the joy, the laughter, the thrills and spills would be filling your mind and soul.

So at some level, I think I gave up on writing fiction after my second book. Sure, on the face of it, I tried to keep the writing going, working on several synopses and draft third novels over a few years. But my heart - and my mind - wasn’t in it. I wanted to be here in the real world, living my real life and not a life of fiction in my head.

At the end of Enid Blyton’s life, she slipped into dementia. In the biopic, this was expressed as part of the spectrum of her need to escape and we are left with a poignant image of her sitting on a small kiddy’s chair after a book reading, happily leafing through one of her own books, laughing softly to herself.

Photo: of Helena Bonham Carter as Enid Blyton, thanks to The Life of Wylie

Chinese-English translator, Nicky Harman, who has previously written for this blog, emailed me last week with some information about a talk she is giving tonight on literary translation. I’m sorry for the short notice about the talk, but if you can make it, it looks like a really interesting insider’s view of the world of translation.

~~~

The Meridian Society/BBCN will be hosting a talk on Tuesday 17th November, 2009 in association with the CSSA of London School of Economics. The lecture will be delivered by Ms Nicky Harman Lecturer at Imperial College.

The many lives of the literary translator

Nicky Harman divides her time between lecturing in technical translation at Imperial College, London and translating literary works from Chinese to English. Her recent book-length translations include Xinran’s Letter from an Unknown Chinese Mother, and Han Dong’s Banished! (awarded a PEN Translation Fund Grant and long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Award, 2008). She also works on the website Paper Republic, which promotes Chinese literature in translation, and is actively concerned with the need to encourage and mentor beginning Chinese-to-English literary translators.

Her research interests focus on aspects of Chinese to English literary translation, and she was Visiting Scholar in the Chinese Departments of Fudan University, Shanghai; and Peking University, Beijing, in 2008, as well as at the Research Centre for Translation at Chinese University Hong Kong, 2006.

Nicky says: “This lecture talk will look at a number of different aspects of literary translation. I will draw on examples from my own work to illustrate the linguistic and cultural challenges of Chinese-to-English translation, and will also examine how the translator needs to present their work to the outside world, that is, publishers and, beyond them, the readers. Just as literary translators have to assume many roles - talent scout and promoter, as well as translator - so this seminar will touch on a whole kaleidoscope of issues. The aim will be to communicate to the audience some of the passion which I feel for translation as a whole, and Chinese-to-English literary translation in particular.”

Time and Venue

Date: Tuesday 17th November, 2009
Time: 7pm-9pm
Venue: D302 in Clement House
Address: The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), Houghton Street, Aldwych, London, WC2A 2AE

Transport: The nearest tube stations are Holborn and Temple (both are 5 mins walk)
The nearest Main Line stations are Waterloo and Charing Cross (both are 10 mins walk)
Buses go to Aldwych: 19, 38, 55 59, 68, 91, 168, 243, 341 & 521
Alternative: For more options please go to:
http://journeyplanner.tfl.gov.uk/user/XSLT_TRIP_REQUEST2?language=en

Tickets are not required but you are urged to RSVP to reserve a seat.
Tel: 07973796866 or Email: themeridiansociety@gmail.com.
TMS/SACU Members free Non-members £3 donation
Note: This talk will be conducted in English

The Meridian Society is a registered charity (No. 1115664) and a company limited by guarantee (No. 5572806

Online bookseller, Amazon, has got the bibliophiles all a-quiver with excitement with its announcement that the Kindle will be sold internationally from mid-October. For those of you who haven’t heard of it yet, the Kindle is a digital book reading device, rather like the clay tablets of ancient times in size and look but electronic and able to store over a thousand books plus mp3s as well as blogs and digital newspapers and magazines. So far, it’s only been available in the US so this next phase is very exciting for book lovers all over the world.

I use the term “book” loosely, of course. Those book lovers who love physical books will not be excited at all by the Kindle on the basis that it lacks all the tactile qualities they love about “real” books - paper, page turning etc. But those who love the content of books and love the idea of being able to carry a thousand books in their pocket, the Kindle is the next big thing.

I fall into the latter group for various reasons:

• I’m lazy and feeble and I like the idea of holding one compact tablet that I can read lying down as well as sitting up.

• I like the idea of being able to carry a range of books around with me but without the weight of the physical books to give me backache and arm ache.

• I like the idea of the text-to-speech facility so that I can load the full text of a book and have it read to me while I sit on the bus. The digital voice might be quite irritating, however - so it will all depend on how life-like it sounds

However, I’m not going to jump in with my credit card immediately as I have some reservations:

• I believe the Kindle ties you to buying all your ebooks from Amazon, in a Kindle-specific format. What happens when my Kindle dies - as inevitably it will, like all electronic devices? I guess I’ll have to shell out for another one - we’ll all start having to think of books like music: but with mp3s or CDS, I can buy my player from any supplier, not just the one company. With the Kindle, am I now stuck forever having to buy it from Amazon?

• I still need to be convinced by the screen quality and how quickly it refreshes when you turn the page - I had a look at the Sony Reader and what put me off is that the screen turns black for a second before it opens onto the next page: ugh.

• It’s a pretty steep price at US$279.

• I remain to be convinced about it’s usefulness outside the US. At the moment, a huge number of e-books from other ebook sites which are available to US buyers are not available to non-US customers due to geographical rights restrictions. Also, if you look at US Audible.com compared to UK Audible.co.uk, the number of audiobooks available in the UK is a lot less than those available in the US - and in particular, major latest releases in the US are glaringly missing from the UK list. I haven’t been able to find anything definitive on the Amazon.com site that gives me any clarity either way about geographical rights restrictions - can anyone help me with this question?

Speaking of geographical rights restrictions, the Kindle will not be available in some countries, including Malaysia - see the list of no-Kindle countries. So my litblogger, book loving friends there are still stuck with the tree-pulp versions of books - although Amazon did reply to blogger Sharon Bakar’s email query to them to say that maybe, perhaps, sometime in the future, the Kindle might become available there…

What about you? Are you going to get a Kindle? Or are you a hard and fast paperbook person?

Photo: thanks to jink (Derek) on Flickr.com (CCL)

Writing books is an odd thing. I’ve now just published my third, as regular readers of this blog will know, and my co-author Silvia Cambie and I have been busy over the summer doing all the related publicity for it - writing articles, giving interviews and presentations. Now that we’ve had the big launch party, I feel that I can relax a bit now and get some of my life back.

Because when you write a book, whether it’s fiction like my two novels or non-fiction like this latest book, the whole process of each book dominates your life for several years. In the case of International Communications Strategy, it took about 18 months to 2 years from the point that Silvia and I first talked about it to publication in July this year.

She had been commissioned by Kogan Page to write a book on international PR and communications and invited me to co-author the social media aspects. We needed to beat out a strong concept and the main themes of the book to present to our editor so that the publishing house new what the produce would be when they got the final manuscript. We evolved the book together over several months, discussing the hot topics in global corporate communications as well as developments in online communications and drafting several versions of the proposal. Annika Knight, our editor, then took it through Kogan Page’s rigourous internal processes - while we were not privvy to these discussions, from what I know of the publishing process, this would most likely have involved getting the Kogan Page team behind the book ie the sales team, the publicity team, the international team and ultimately the senior management, such as Helen Kogan herself.

When we heard back that we had the green light, the next step was to negotiate the contract and agree a timetable for delivery of the manuscript and a deadline for publication. All of which takes time and forward planning.

And finally - we were good to go.

In the meantime, of course, Silvia and I had been collecting case studies, following up on leads and doing background research. This process, for me, continued for a little while longer before I felt confident to sit down and actually start writing. I had never written non-fiction before and was feeling a bit nervous about it all - so my solution was to put off the writing and to carry on doing the research! As a fiction writer, you can make things up and change the scenario if you find that your story is not working out as you had hoped. Or you can fudge some facts if they prove difficult for your narrative thrust. You are after all the god of the universe you’ve created. But non-fiction! You have to back up everything you say with real evidence and hard facts. You have to reference and footnote everything. Your opinions and extrapolations must be derived from reality.

Eeks.

But once I finally sat down to write up my research, I found it was not as scary or difficult as I had feared. It was actually rather like writing a blog post. Where I normally would put links to items I was referencing, I just inserted a footnote. In some ways, writing non-fiction is easier than writing fiction. I could always cross-check the facts or double check something with a respondent I had interviewed. I could quote their very words. The case studies were real, existing in this universe so I didn’t have to make up a world that I needed to convince my readers to believe in. I was still telling stories - but it was the stories of real people in the real world.

And I really loved it!

And then came the tedious part. Once we finished the manuscript, we had to make it lovely and tidy to submit to Kogan Page. Silvia had used a different font and layout from me and had set out her footnotes differently. So we had to amend the formatting to make it all match and sort out a contents page and pagination. We submitted it via Box.net in true Web 2.0 fashion (rather than on a CD as requested in the Kogan Page Author Guidelines). Next came the editing process where an editor and copy-editor went through the text line by line making amendments, raising queries, checking for errors and inconsistencies - and engaging us as authors in the process. So we went through the manuscript yet again - and again, and again!

When the final text was signed off, there was still the blurb and author bios to do. There was the author questionnaire from the marketing and sales department so that they would have all the information they needed to hand to do their jobs of selling and marketing the book. We also had a long discussion about the book title - should it have the word “PR” in it? “Cross cultural”? “Strategy” or “Strategies”? and so on - and after several weeks of to-ing and fro-ing settled on the current title. Whew!

But no, it’s not done yet. In the lead up to the time of publication and in the few months afterwards, we’ve been talking and writing endlessly about the book and its key concepts as part of the publicity process. Don’t get me wrong - it’s very exciting and satisfying when other people (the media, bloggers, business people and professionals) are interested in our book and it makes all the hard work worthwhile. But for me, I finished writing the book last year so in my mind, it’s a completed project - so the whole publicity process feels strange. I know from speaking to a number of writers that many of us feel this same sense of disorientation.

So, now that our book launch went off with such a bang, I feel finally the sense of having achieved a wonderful thing together with Silvia. I guess I just needed the big party to celebrate and put a marker down, like planting a flag at the top of Everest or on the moon. Aaah, the long journey is done!

And I can now move onwards to my next project….

Photo: thanks to Marc Wright

I blogged about Mobile Phone Novels awhile back and got this email recently from a writer who had only just come across the post.

There’s been a resurgence recently in the short story, ever since the success of movie adaptations of them, such as Brokeback Mountain, so this trend towards short literary forms in innovative formats strikes me as part of that move towards bite-sized reads.

Congratulations to TP Keating for his/ her success in this fascinating new genre!

~~~

.

Hi Yang-May,

In answer to the question on your blog, “Do you know of any writers in English who have a written mobile phone novel?”, I am putting my hand up!
As you say, “…one could write it on a PC, blog-style, and then post it to whatever mobile phone novel site there is around.” That’s exactly me.

Textnovel affords readers the opportunity to follow along as I add new chapters to my latest work. Readers can post comments and vote on my stories too, once they have registered (which is free).

US romance publisher Dorchester Publishing, in conjunction with Textnovel, is currently running a contest, where the author with the most votes will
secure a $2,000 advance, along with a publishing contract. My contemporary romance, London by Chance, is in contention for this prize.

My previous stories, Twilight Journey (supernatural) and Robinson “Zombie Killer” Crusoe (horror) have been Editor’s picks, and I am amongst the
top ten most popular authors on Textnovel.

According to feedback I have received from readers, the stories on Textnovel have been successfully accessed on “a native browser on a small-screened LG handset and the browser on the large-screen T-Mobile”, amongst other options.

Thank you for your very enjoyable, informative blog.

Kind regards,
T.P. Keating
London
www.tpkeating.com

Photo: thanks to Ed Yourdon on flickr.com (CCL)

One of the early uses of the internet was as a networked space for academics to communicate with each other. In the subsequent rush of businesses online with Web 1.0 websites and now with the rise of social media in the form of Web 2.0, it’s easy to overlook what academics are continuing to do in this virtual space.

Back in 2007, I blogged about the Oxford University project that has put online fascimiles of Wilfred Owen’s poetry via the Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive.

Now, the University and the Municipal Library of the city of Rouen in France has created an online archive for the original manucript of Gustav Flaubert’s novel, Madame Bovary, the original desperate housewife.

The site is in French but if you go to the navigation bar on the right and click on “Feuilleter”, you will get a further selection of “Plans et scenarios” and also “Brouillons 1- 6″. Click on any of those subselections and you’ll be given the option to view different parts of the book. Select any of those and a new screen will show you a fascimile of the original handwritten manuscript on the left, with Flaubert’s amendments, and a typesccript version with his strikeout and additional text also shown.

As a literature grad and also a novelist, I find it fascinating to look at writers’ manuscripts - to see their original words and how they may have changed a word or sentence here and there to better convey what they have imagined in their minds. In the British Museum, many years ago, I pored over some pages of the manuscript of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte that were on display in a glass cabinet in the manucript room. It was amazing to see the tiny handwriting and Bronte’s original words as well as the changes she had made. It was frustrating at the same time in that I could view no more than the few pages they had placed on display. The brilliant thing about the online Bovary fascimile is that not only are specialist scholars able to access every page of Flaubert’s manuscript but anyone in the world may do so also - with the assistance of the typescript alongside and without damage to the original.