As usual we were listening to the radio first thing this morning, and as it was Saturday we lingered companionably in bed, drinking our morning tea, reading and listening to the radio. We’ve had a busy, frantic, and in a weird way emotional week, so we felt we deserved it! The radio comes on automatically tuned to Radio 4, so we caught up with the news from home and abroad and then at nine o’clock, after another news update it was the usual weekend program of ‘Saturday Live’ which is always interesting and varied.
“Saturday Live’ is a BBC Radio 4 magazine programme, first broadcast on 16 September 2006. It combines contributions from studio guests with real-life stories and short features.”
There were three guests today, pianist Sarah Nicolls who has ‘reinvented’ the grand piano by re-engineering it so that although the keyboard is at it has always been, the strings and all the gubbins inside stand vertically in front of her. She can play the keyboard but also pluck the strings (I think I’ve understood ths correctly!) Another guest was Felix White of the British indie rock band, The Maccabbees who has been passionate about football for just about all his life. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of any music by his band, and when I looked through their discography, nothing was familiar to me.
The third guest was the writer and author, Ken Follett and of course I pricked up my ears and paid attention to the part of the programme involving him.
Ken Follett has sold 200 million books around the world, in more than 80 countries and into 30 different languages. He made his breakthrough with spy thrillers before working his way back through time, and now we find him telling the story of the building of Stonehenge in his latest book, “Circle of Days”.
Ken is incredibly successful but he works incredibly hard at his writing, has apparently sold over two hundred million books (that must be several counties total library collections!) in ninety different countries, in forty different languages. haven’t read any of his books – for no real reason, I guess I just haven’t come across any in a way which would have tempted me to. They are described as thrillers, espionage, historical, political, mysteries – so now I’m wondering why I haven’t ever read any, and thinking to myself that maybe I should and maybe I will. What interested me more, however, was what he said about writing – about the way he writes. Because it was an interview and there were other guests who commented and contributed, his own story came out in a slightly random fashion.
Ken worked in journalism, and was prompted to write in a different way when his car completely broke down and he needed £200 to get it fixed – in his situation at that time an impossibility. A collegue mentioned in passing that he had just had a book published and had received a similar amount to what Ken needed from the publisher. You can imagine the rest! However it was only when his eleventh book was published (which may have been ‘Fall of Giants’ which I worked out from his bibliography on Wikipedia) that he had a best seller.
I’ve self-published a number of books, unlike Ken I had no contacts, no knowledge of the publishing industry, no-one to support or help me find a way to get in contact with agents, editors, publishers, people in the media. I’m not complaining, nor comparing my books to Ken’s which obviously must resonate with his audience because he is so popular, admired and well-known. But just a little bit of me wishes I had had some connection with someone who could have put something I had written out there, to really see whether I cut it as a writer.
Lois Elsden 