For months, I’ve been contemplating giving up—not just this column, but writing. Altogether. I hope this won’t sound like a long whine, whinge, or worse—the dreaded ‘mansplaining.’ But for a long time, there has been no interest in my work from the industry, even though I’m fairly sure I write better than I did fifteen years ago, when there was a lot of interest. Some of that, I suspect, is because of the current ‘woke’ moment—what a ‘vile phrase’ that is, to quote the Bard. But I’ve moaned about that before so I won’t now.

            It could also be because my writing simply isn’t engaging a new, different audience: one that is not only ‘woker’ (presumably, if we can trust the media), but one is that is doubtless younger, and suffers from a shorter attention span.

Let me say first that this was a large Zoom group, and the editor and author are both alumni of Selwyn, one of the colleges of the University of Cambridge, as I am. I did manage to ask one question. Since it was a private group I shall not name the figures, though you may be able to guess who they are, particularly the editor.

The editor founded one of the largest independent publishers in the world in the eighties, and has published Booker Prize winners and Nobel Prize winners. He also discovered JK Rowling–to whom he offered the princely advance of £1,500 for her first novel. (Her agent persuaded him to raise the offer to £2,500!) Many people in the meeting asked questions about how to find a publisher, whether an agent was necessary, and so on.

Most fiction writers don’t read much poetry, let’s be honest. I confess I don’t read much contemporary American poetry myself. So much of it is either incomprehensible–even to someone who has a higher degree in Creative Writing–or pretentious, or simply tedious in its insistence on the usual woke themes. However, this past few weeks I’ve been reading the Oxford Library of English Poetry, a three-volume anthology edited by John Wain, and have found it not only immensely pleasurable, but also, I believe, useful.

Let’s take the pleasure part first. This anthology contains no American verse, and as Wain himself admits, there have been many great American poets. If you were to make an anthology of the best verse in English, a number of them would have to be included: Whitman and Emily Dickinson are two obvious giants.

Are You Destined for Literary Success?

Just fill in our quiz, all you talented wordsmiths, and find out!

1. How talented are you? Be brutally honest, babes! a. Off the charts – right up there with Dan Brown and Lee Childs b. No genius, but I know my craft, and work my ass off c. Martin Amis or Salman Rushdie would like my work if they knew it d. I don’t know crap about grammar or spelling, but hey, that’s what editors are for, right?
2. How much training do you have in Creative Writing? a. Bachelor’s degree b. MFA c. PhD d. I went to a summer workshop and slept with one of the tutors
3. Your social media presence a. rivals Kim Kardashian’s b.

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Let’s face it: plenty of writers are rubbish. I’m afraid I despise, deplore, or simply detest quite a lot of them. They include:

Writers with no sense of humour;

Writers who think they mustn’t offend anyone;

Writers who believe the purpose of fiction is to edify their readers;

Smug, self-righteous, or sententious writers;

‘Woke’ writers;

Writers with an overt or covert political agenda (especially the latter);

Pretentious writers;

Writers who are toadies, lickspittles and arse-kissers;

Writers who admire (or pretend to admire) other writers because they are successful;

Writers who believe that an MFA or PhD in Creative Writing qualifies them to write;

Writers who believe that a writer’s colour, religion, sexual orientation, sex (or gender!) qualifies anyone to write;

Writers who whine about their white privilege;

Writers who don’t bother to learn the rules of English usage or spelling;

Writers who don’t think it’s important to read the canon;

Writers who think the canon needs to be decolonised;

Writers who think it’s necessarily important to read the latest literary prize winners;

Writers who are ignorant of history and philosophy;

Writers who think their drug experiences are interesting;

Writers who believe that their experiences as victims is fascinating and important;

Writers who despise other writers because they are not, or were not, morally pure;

Writers who follow the latest trends and write for the market;

Writers who think that their ‘platform’ is important;

Writers who believe that writers are essentially social engineers;

Writers who are certain that their values and views are correct;

Writers who can’t think for themselves (at the current time, the majority, sad to say);

Writers who watch more TV or movies than read books;

Writers who want the writer’s ‘lifestyle’;

Writers who think their job is always to be kind;

Writers with no imagination (a surprisingly large proportion);

Writers with no ear for language (incredibly, the majority, whether ‘literary’ or otherwise);

Writers who think literary agents know more about literature than they do;

Writers who believe that the world needs their novel;

To sum up: Writers who are not artists, but hacks or halfwits.

She didn’t do an MFA in Creative Writing, let alone a PhD. She didn’t even have a BA in it. Or in English. And yet Jane wrote the initial draft of Sense and Sensibility when she was 18, and had finished Pride and Prejudice by the time she was 20. Astonishing? Yes. So how did she do it? Did she follow the advice of the self-appointed writing gurus—who tell you that if you can’t do a degree in the subject, you need to attend expensive conferences, join writing groups, get professional editors? No, none of that. So how on earth did she learn her craft?

By reading and writing. I’m not an Austen scholar, but I know that in the late eighteenth century England’s public libraries had not yet been founded, so it’s fair to assume that most of her reading was done in her father’s library.

Are you getting bored by so-called literary fiction these days? Perhaps finding it didactic, lecturing and hectoring—and terribly predictable? One of the results of the ‘liberal consensus’ which almost everyone I know shares, is that there is a great tribe of people who not only have the same views on nearly every issue, but also that this tribe, composed largely of academics and the intelligentsia, expects its writers to trumpet those views, and punishes writers who fail to do so. Writers have always been concerned with social issues like poverty, prejudice against women, certain social classes, and ethnic and other minorities; the difference is that nowadays, instead of investigating them, dispassionately, and allowing the reader to make up his or her mind, many writers are simply preaching: using fictional forms to promote an ideology.

Peter Handke was one of the two winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature this year, and by now everyone knows, as the Swedish Academy did, that he supported Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader accused of genocide. My intention here is not to discuss whether Handke is a man who approves of genocide or not, but to question the basis on which literary prizes are awarded. Are they given for literary merit, or for the personal merit of the author? Or to put it another way: are prizes given for the value of the work of art, or for the character of the artist? This question is important not only for literature but more broadly for our entire civilisation.

My own political position should be irrelevant, but in case anyone doubts, let me begin by affirming that I condemn the genocide in Bosnia by the Bosnian Serbian forces, and have no sympathy whatever with Milosevic.

‘I would dread a world where to publish I had first to be certified as a nice person,’ wrote Lionel Shriver in The Spectator (16 December, 2017), and I agree. So, in the interests of countering what I consider to be the noxious and nauseating habit of being nice all the time—how the kindergarten teachers who police our arts love to lecture us on that—I have decided to publish a list of my least favourite writers. No gushing over how wonderful these fictioneers are, or what exemplary human beings they may be. No. These are people whose writing is over-rated, in my view (‘but that’s just me,’ as the current phrase goes, as if we should apologise for having an opinion at all, which we do if we are to remain PC-approved), or whose personalities I find abhorrent, usually because they’re sanctimonious or affected or hypocritical–but I feel I’m entitled to a little prejudice.