Tash Aw: After the Epilogue: What starts when the writing is finished

(This week I'm covering the International Festival of Authors in Toronto. This event is After the Epilogue: What starts when the writing is finished, with Tash Aw, Andrea De Carlo, Giles Foden and Sarah Waters.)

It was interesting to see that this panel moved fairly quickly from questions of craft (How do you know a novel is done?) to questions of sales and marketing (How do you sell your novel once you have it?). The event reached a weird sort of antithesis of itself when the authors somehow collectively reached the conclusion that that readings and public events are generally a strain in that they can't write when they're on tour, and once they finish a book they really just want to let it go. Tash Aw (author of The Harmony Silk Factory) had a nice way of expressing this: he said that once a writer is done with a novel he needs to become "emotionally detached" from it, and that often an author will be working on an entirely different book when touring for the last one, meaning that his head will be in an entirely different place. This, in Aw's opinion, can make the readings very cold, even to the point that an author grows weary of reading the book again.

It was at that moment that the host (perhaps inadvertently) cornered Giles Foden (author of The Last King of Scotland and, most recently, Turbulence) with a question of why he was at the panel, given the general agreement about said panel's conflict with an author's primary job. Foden did a nice job of backing out of it with an answer about creating a dialogue between writers and readers--sort of opening up a space to talk about literature--that, frankly, sounded authentic. Further putting a nice spin on public events, Aw stepped in to remark that seeing the readers interact with a work is gratifying and also provides a certain sense of closure for an author.

I also liked Foden's remark, earlier in the panel, that a writer is really only a writer while writing--essentially, that coming to a public event expecting to see a "writer" wasn't going to give readers the real sense of what a writer is. He concluded his remark with something I've long felt is true: essentially, if you want to know what a writer is about, don't hear him talk at an event: read the book. Although there was some consensus that public events had their good points and could promote a culture of reading, there was also consensus that people shouldn't necessarily approach them as a way of getting behind the scenes or as a replacement for reading.

Continuing the sale and marketing theme, the panel also addressed questions of there being too many books published (general agreement that there were) and whether celebrity authors and such made their task as "real writers" (Andrea De Carlo's term) more difficult. As to the latter, Sarah Waters took the tack that David Beckham paid her wages, although De Carlo was adamant in his opinion. He put forth the interesting argument that though celebrity authors do prop up many publishers, they also take up a lot of space at bookstores and make it more difficult for serious writers to get space and attention.