Literature festivals always amaze me. They are artful confidence tricks played on willing readers and novice, wannabe, writers across the UK. They are the official propaganda and dream machines for the producer, publisher and business sponsors that pander to the fictional creation of ‘the writer’s life’ – what on earth is that? - and the shape shifting glimpse of the ‘world of publishing’ – something which, for most ticket buying customers, at a festival, can only be seen through the wrong end of a telescope, far away, remote and with occasional sparks of interest - like Mars giving off gas - or typically when the author brilliantly add-libs whilst resolutely not reading from their latest novel, or poetry collection.
 
Years ago, the writer E. M Forster, said what makes a festival ‘festive’ is new work especially commissioned and premiered for a festival, only. How many do that? Who, by the way, remembers what a novelist reads from their new book? Not many. My friends, of course, notice the lip gloss and pink shoes of Mariella Frostrup in the Hay at Sky tent, or, the faded T-shirt Benjamin Zephaniah wears at the Edinburgh book festival or how shaky Ken Smith is with drink (bless him and I miss him) at the T S Elliot awards.
 
And, I wonder, how good must it be to have an interviewer, smiling besides you, who has actually read up to page 250, which of course - if ever and whenever they do - they will quite rightly draw attention to your lovely, enduring image or beautifully crafted metaphor at the end of the book.  Also, their stamina for having go that far through the ghost written stodge of the latest reality television sensation, or former, faded, film star. Maybe, that one with wild, matted, jet black hair. Or that one with a generous cleavage, seen often splashed across numerous tabloid front pages.
 
But, I don’t complain. I buy my ticket. I come for what one former director of the Poetry Society called ‘poetryness’, that ‘ness’ being the  unpublished, incidental - sometimes inspirational - aside and verbal footnote, given live and generously, if you’re lucky, on stage. The gem that no reader will get to read or hear (unless they pay for a download version of the event). This is what delights my bookish soul. That, and the belief that the author is venerable and compels an hour of rapt and awestruck silence. And, natch, when, if you ever scratch out a first novel or poetry collection of your own, don’t you just yearn for that…illusion.
 
Never mind the hours and days and weeks spent on the writing, editing, correcting and proof reading. Just as the high wire act has to practise on a cold and bleak Monday morning, so does the author, their friends and the eventual editor do an awful lot behind the scene. Yet, I want to believe in Hay, or Edinburgh or Ledbury and lovely dinners and taxi rides home or lush hotel rooms. And the prizes, Orange ones or poetic ones handed over from Mrs Valery Eliot, the odd bursary with folding blue ones, here and there, a film or television option maybe (yippee) but never, not once will you see or hear about the drafts, the sixth rewrite and copious reader/editor comments to consider. That’s not the story we come for. It’s the fact of fiction that can’t appear on stage, only as an addendum and appendices.
 
So when I sit down at Edinburgh, Ledbury, Manchester, ‘Aye Write’ Stanza, Manchester, Birmingham, Aldburgh and all the other great literature festivals that we go to worship, don’t expect to hear you could earn more as a second hand car sales man or that most books do well to sell more than 500 copies. That’s not what a festival is for. Too much reality, darling! Enjoy the adoring question and answer sessions, the romance and the dream of a fat cash, literary advance and a film option instead. Anything aside from the four walls, a window, an idea and the typing, to which, now, I return and continue…

Adrian Johnson recently completed his first novel ‘Love and taxes – how Jack and Sandra beat the poll tax.’
http://www.youtube.com/adrianwriter 
July 10 2008

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