As someone whose tiny, grimy literary novels have attracted the interest of the film industry, the truth is the opposite of what Tim Lott (Why should we subsidise writers who’ve lost the plot?, 2 January) suggests; it’s the screenwriter who needs the literary novelist. Plot is easy to learn (and even easier to flog to impressionable students excited by the supposed glamour of the writing life), but impossible to make work on the page without an ability to master what the novel can uniquely convey: the deep mysteries of human interiority. Or, as the screenwriters say, character.
Helen Cross
Flamborough, East Yorkshire
• Tim Lott clearly has not heard of, nor read: Adam Thorpe (Ulverton), Graham Swift (Waterland and Mothering Sunday), Sebastian Barry (A Long, Long Way and Days Without End), Colm Tóibín (Norah Webster), Kamila Shamsie (Home Fire), Salley Vickers (Miss Garnet’s Angel) and many other contemporary British and Irish authors who maintain and expand a “great tradition” of fictional output.
Andy Stelman
Bishop’s Castle, Shropshire
• It is not just writers of literary fiction who have lost the plot but the entire industry. Literary fiction is in decline partly because elitist writers ignore narrative pace and plot but also due to the industry’s obsession with quick-selling commercial novels or celebrity books. This “stack ’em high, sell ’em cheap” mentality (or not so cheap as the case may be) makes it almost impossible for new writers to break into the mainstream, unless they happen to have an existing media profile which agents and publishers can take advantage of. Hence the prevalence of so many books by TV pundits, politicians, fashion models and cooks (most of which end up in local charity shops at knockdown prices). Until the industry is willing to take a risk on new, previously unpublished writers of literary fiction (particularly those working in the short form, which is heavily discriminated against), nothing is going to change. The best literary fiction comes from great storytellers. In today’s climate, would writers such as Angela Carter, JG Ballard and Ray Bradbury ever get published?
Mark Stewart
Haslemere, Surrey
• Tim Lott’s piece reminded me of a sentence in a rejection letter from one of many publishers to whom I offered my still unpublished novel. “We admired the economy of style,” they wrote, “but it did not have the pretensions of a literary novel.” As I had set out to write what I hoped was simply an engaging piece of narrative fiction, I took it as a compliment.
Richard Adams
Thornton Cleveleys, Lancashire
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