“As with Little Bee, Chris Cleave has written a novel that encompasses love, compassion, and tragedy through which emerges the goodness of mankind and the importance of friendship. One reads the pages of Gold like they were racing Kate and Zoe on the track of the velodrome—fast, unstopping, breathing hard until the next page where you have to hold your breath to see who wins the heat….Emotionally stunning, brilliantly written…You will hold on for the ride.”
—Annie Philbrick, Bank Square Books, Mystic, CT

“I do not how Chris does it—he makes you feel every little nuance and detail…You feel as if you have known [the characters] all your life… I loved this book and cannot wait to pass it around to all of my colleagues at work. Gold medal to Chris Cleave for writing an amazing book!”
—Toni Ness, Barnes & Noble, Grand Rapids, MI

“Gold is about parenthood, relationships, priorities, and the sacrifices that are made for love, or fear. It’s about celebrity and intimacy, the trials of competition on your head and heart, and about figuring out who you are and remaining true to that….Gold runs through a gauntlet of emotions that will not leave that reader untouched. More simply, this is a marvelous and enveloping read.”
—Jackie Belm, Tattered Cover, Denver, CO

“Chris Cleave has scored another ‘gold’ with his latest novel….Like Little Bee and Incendiary, it is impossible to describe; rather, it is one of those rare books you can’t wait to put into the hands of the reader and say, ‘Trust me on this one.’”
—Beth Black, The Bookworm, Omaha, NE

“Chris Cleave is a wonderful storyteller and Gold is as compelling a read as Little Bee….You will love these characters who are struggling to understand what is the right choice to make….I became so engaged with both Zoe and Kate that I didn’t know what to hope for.”
—Jeanne Costello, Maria’s Bookshop, Durango, CO

“I truly loved and enjoyed Gold! Chris Cleave has written another terrific story that will not disappoint his Little Bee fans and will only broaden his fan base. And how could you not love Sophie?”
—Susan Barthold, Barnes & Noble #2782, Willow Grove, PA

“Chris Cleave is already one of the luminaries of modern fiction and his talent shines just as brightly as the title in Gold. In a novel centered on the world of competitive cycling, he gives all of the work and trauma of that elite society but, more importantly, shows us the same work and trauma involved in the ordinary lives of his characters, particularly eight-year-old Sophie, who suffers from leukemia and demonstrates the same determination and courage of the world class riders. This is a novel that inspires, informs, provides sadness and exhilaration and shows empathy for the human condition that is rare. It is a reading experience not to be missed.”
—Bill Cusumano, Nicola’s Books, Ann Arbor, MI

“Gold vibrates and rattles the psyche—and made me gasp, smile and cheer. Chris Cleave has done it again!”
—Ed Conklin, Chaucer’s Books, Santa Barbara, CA

“Using the microcosm of Olympic level biking and all the sacrifice that the athletes make for one shining moment, juxtaposed with the very real threat of losing a child, Cleave has ripped my heart out again with a family story where the lines are blurred and at the end there is only life left for us to ponder.”
—Valerie Koehler, Blue Willow Bookshop, Houston, TX

“Gold by Chris Cleave is as riveting as an Olympic race for a gold medal.”
—Patricia Sanders, Barnes & Noble #2940, Towson, MD

“Gold is a heartbreakingly wonderful novel. Cleave has written a breathtaking, multi-layered tale that has everything a good book needs: love, friendship, suspense, heart-pounding races, twists, turns, humor and of course, Star Wars references. I found myself holding my breath in anticipation of the next page wondering where the story would go and unable to put the book down until I read just one more page. Cleave has an unbelievable talent for writing about characters you fall in love with and want to keep reading about. I don’t know which character I love the most, but I didn’t want their stories to end…And how can you not fall in love with Sophie? Gold is destined to be a bestseller. Like Little Bee, when you finish the book, you want to talk about it…you want to tell someone they HAVE to read this amazing book.”
—Eric Sample, Barnes & Noble #2305, Cedar Hill, TX

I’m writing this because I feel that the strikes will be more effective if people like myself, who are not in the public sector, add their voices to the action.

I don’t take this position out of any ideological conviction. I simply support the people in the public sector because the people in the public sector have supported me. They are hardworking people who know their own circumstances better than I do, and if they have voted for strike action, then I trust them to know that that is their best option.

The public sector includes the state school teachers who taught me & who teach my children. It includes the librarians who regularly host my community events and who promote reading in cities throughout the UK. It includes the NHS doctors and nurses who recently saved the lives of my sister-in-law and niece. It includes a lot of other extremely hard-working people who keep me safe and take away my mess and generally give me the space and time to write novels and blog posts.

They are the best of our society and it breaks my heart to see them taking the brunt of this government’s budget cuts. I quite understand that we live in straitened times. Nor am I convinced that punishing the rich would magically make everything okay. What I am certain of, however, is that there are many budgets that should be cut – not least our seemingly infinite budget for procuring arms and prosecuting foreign wars – before we start cutting basic public services.

The public sector is the trunk of the tree. It enables all the rest of us monkeys to do our stuff in the branches. If you are a public sector worker out on the picket lines today, then you are doing it on behalf of all of us. Thank you for your work and thank you for your voice.

Dear fellow writer,

Delivering a novel in a month must be the most extreme challenge in writing.

I can’t claim to have done it in a month, but I once drafted a novel in six weeks. That draft eventually became my first published book, Incendiary. There are three things you need to know about that. One, that the first draft was unpublishable. Two, that the obsession and the sleep deprivation drove me to a place of dubious mental stability which, in retrospect, we can all laugh about. And three, that I am more proud of those six weeks than of any other period in my life. It changed me. I was working in an attic room in Paris, living on coffee and nerves. I say “living” – in truth I was mutating. I crossed a Rubicon that they will have to drag my cold dead body back across.

That’s what you’re doing, if you’re doing NaNoWriMo. You could have chosen to write a short story this month. You could have redecorated. You could have lounged on your couch and absorbed reality TV, formulating opinions about which of the nice young people ought to be your nation’s brand new idol. Instead you have crossed a line of no return. You have chosen to engage – and in many cases reengage – with a dangerous process that changes you.

We live in an age when the war for hearts and minds is considered just as vital as the war for territory on the battlefield. In a world where ideas hold so much power, a writer is on civilization’s front line. To become a writer, therefore, is a serious business. It requires a commitment to move from passively absorbing your cultural tradition to informing it. That’s a significant transformation, and like all major works it won’t happen overnight. In your case, you’ve scheduled it for the month of November.

The good news is, if you’re committed, a month is enough time. Unless you have more natural talent than I do, then it’s not necessarily enough time to produce a perfected novel. But if you write out of your skin every day then it is enough time to learn your own mental geography and to make the jump to a new way of writing.

It doesn’t matter what genre you write in. All literature is transformative. To make people laugh; to tell a light-hearted romantic story; to let intelligent readers forget their troubles for an hour in the absence of the politicians and the money men who make our lives hell – these are some of the hardest feats to accomplish as a writer, and some of the most serious political acts you can perform. You don’t have to be a Serious Writer to be a serious writer. I once read a beautiful paragraph about teenage vampires – teenage vampires, for goodness’ sake – that moved me more than all of Hemingway. You don’t need to be trying to change the world in order to change someone’s world. What you need is to be seriously committed to your work.

That commitment comes from you and it isn’t my business to tell you what form it should take. I just wanted to use this opportunity to let you know how much I respect you for what you are doing, to wish you well, and to offer some practical suggestions from my experience.

To this end I asked my followers on Twitter if they were doing NaNoWriMo this year and, if so, whether they had any practical questions or concerns that they would like me to address in this pep talk. I got a lot of questions and found that they fell into three main categories, of which the following are representative:

Not much, I think. A novel is a living thing and it resists containment within the structures we erect for it. Even worse, the novel has intelligence and it will inevitably turn against its creator. Think of it like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park. The problem is that a good character in a novel will reach a point of maturity where he or she is not necessarily biddable.

For example, I might plan that in Chapter 6, Samantha will succumb to the advances of the amorous Dave, thus neatly setting up Chapter 7, in which they build a delightful house together, in Minnesota, in the Prairie style. But it might turn out, once I get into the detail of the dialogue of Ch 6, that Dave turns out to be something of a pompous ass and that Samantha decides she’d rather be with Dave’s funnier younger brother Pete (even though she still can’t decide whether he’s strikingly handsome or slightly weird-looking).

So now I have a choice as a writer. Either I can make Chapter 6 conform to my original plan by forcing Samantha to be with Dave, somewhat against her will, or I can let Chapter 6 be what it needs to be – probably feeling more alive and real than it did in my original structure – and I can change my mind about what happens in Chapter 7. Maybe Samantha builds the house with Pete, and Dave comes and bangs against the windows on a cold, snowy night. Maybe they ignore him, and forget about it all through the drunken, passionate winter, only to find his perfectly-preserved body down by the brook, when the spring thaw comes and the first crocuses are breaking surface, on the morning when Samantha is starting to think that maybe she doesn’t want to be with Pete after all.

My point is that the job of a novelist is to explore human emotion and motivation. You learn more about your protagonists as you write them. If you are not very often forced by your characters to bin your masterplan, then you are a wooden and a formulaic writer indeed. So, better than having a planned structure is to begin with a character or two, and a theme you intend to explore, and an initial direction you plan to start exploring in. Don’t be alarmed when, on arriving at what you thought was your summit, you realise you’ve climbed up the wrong mountain. That’s why novelists go through drafts – because plans go brilliantly awry.

The answer to this question is always changing for me. When I started writing as a child I just loved the work of making good sentences and paragraphs – of playing with language. Later I was motivated by provoking strong reactions in the people I showed my work to. Then there was a bad time of several years when I was motivated by a desire for a certain kind of glory or glamour, without thinking too hard about what that meant. I think you need to get through that stage pretty quickly.

After my first novel was published I was motivated to bring injustices to light with my work, and to help people concussed by bad TV to find real life interesting again. That had a kind of grandiosity to it, though, and I found that my writing improved when I learned a little bit more humility. Then, after my second novel did well, I was motivated for a long time by fear – the fear of not being able to do it again. What cured me of that was rediscovering my very first motivation – the love of working with language and character.

I’d say that is what motivates me now. I simply enjoy sitting down in front of my screen and exploring my characters. I like the mental work of solving the problems of plot and structure. I like exercising my freedom to write as I please, for readers who have the freedom to read as they please. I like not needing anyone’s permission. I try to remember how lucky we all are to live like this. I see it as a temporary state of grace and I find that very motivating.

Something I’ve learned is that it’s very hard to tell, at the end of your writing day, whether you’ve done great work or bad work. The quality of the writing is hard to judge until you’ve had some sleep and got some perspective on it. Often sheer euphoria at your own brilliance will keep you writing late into the night, and you can hardly sleep because what you’ve written is so damned good. Then you wake up the next day and read it, and you realise it’s a pile of self-indulgent crap. This happens to me two days out of five. Then you get the opposite case, where you beat yourself up because the ideas are coming so slowly and all your dialogue seems timid and pedestrian. A week later you might look back on that day as a pretty solid performance, where your characters were honest with each other and maybe even created a couple of touching moments.

The more I learn about the writing process, the more I suspect that there is no such thing as a bad day at the keyboard. Sometimes you need slow days where you work through a dozen ideas that aren’t destined to fly. It creates a kind of intensity that eventually goads your brain into giving you a good day. Or sometimes, if you keep having slow days, then perhaps the novel really is asking you a deeper question about whether your plot, or your characterisation, or your theory about the human heart really is up to scratch. Experience is knowing when you’re having a slow day, versus when you’re having a slow novel.

The good days are when you perform; the slow days are when you learn to perform better. The only bad days as a writer are the ones when you are too cowardly or too lazy to sit down at the keyboard and give it everything you have.

If you can sit down at the keyboard every day in November and give it everything you have, then there is no writer on earth who is better than you. I hope that it will be an exciting, frightening, weird, joyful, unpredictable, transformative month for you, and I hope that you will produce fantastic work that you are proud of.

With all good wishes,

Chris Cleave

You can follow Chris on Twitter @chriscleave, and learn more about his work at www.chriscleave.com.

The event is organised by the Manuel Bravo Project. The true story of Manuel Bravo was a key inspiration for my novel Little Bee / The Other Hand.

Please see the details of the event here and my personal invitation to lawyers here. If you’re a lawyer or working in a related capacity, please come along. If you know a lawyer who may be interested in working with refugees in a pro bono capacity, please let them know about the event.

Many thanks!
Chris Cleave

On Friday, May 13th the Book-It Repertory Theatre will perform a staged reading from “Little Bee” adapted and directed by Annie Lareau, and I will join the adapter/director and cast for a discussion with the audience from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. The organizers say: “Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., Microsoft Auditorium, Level 1, 206-386-4636. Tickets and reservations are not required. Doors will open at 12:30 p.m. Limited parking will be available in the Central Library garage at the regular rates.”

Later on Friday, May 13th I’ll be discussing “Little Bee” from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., again at Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., Microsoft Auditorium, Level 1, 206-386-4636. The organizers say: “No tickets are required. The Library will close at its regular Friday time at 6 p.m. and will reopen the Fourth Avenue entrance at 6:30 p.m. Limited parking in the Central Library garage will be available for $5 after 5 p.m. The event is presented in partnership with The Elliott Bay Book Co. Books will be available for purchase and signing.”

In addition to these two events, I’ll be at four branch library locations across the city to meet all comers, to chat about books in general and mine in particular, and to answer any and all questions. The organizers say: “Doors will be open 30 minutes before each branch event. Limited free parking and street parking is available at branch libraries.” Times and locations for these events are:

• 1 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. Thursday, May 12 – Seattle Central Community College, 1701 Broadway, Room 4106, 206-386-4636
• 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Thursday, May 12 – Northeast Branch, 6801 35th Ave. N.E., 206-684-7539
• 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Saturday, May 14 – Ballard Branch, 5614 22nd Ave. N.W., 206-684-4089
• 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday, May 14 – Beacon Hill Branch, 2821 Beacon Ave. S., 206-684-4711

If you can make it to any of these events, I will be delighted to meet you!

I’ll also be sharing what I’m reading by some extraordinary upcoming writers, answering all questions, and signing books. I love meeting readers – please do come if you can make it. As far as I know all the events are free of charge – though etiquette murmurs discreetly that you should buy a book (not necessarily one of mine!) to support the booksellers who are very kindly hosting the events.

Here are the dates:

• Tues, Jan 11 – DENVER – Tattered Cover, 1628 16th Street, 7.30 – 8.30 pm
• Weds, Jan 12 – LOS ANGELES – Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E Colorado Blvd, 7.00 -8.00 pm
• Thurs, Jan 13 – LOS ANGELES – Book Soup, 8818 West Sunset Blvd, 7.00 – 8.00 pm
• Fri, Jan 14 – PORTLAND – Powell’s Books, 3415 Cedar Hills Blvd, 7.30 – 8.30 pm
• Sun, Jan 16 – MADISON, CT – R J Julia Booksellers, Madison Center, 768 Boston Post Road, 4.30 – 5.30 pm
• Mon, Jan 17 – BROOKLYN – Book Court Bookstore, 163 Court Street, 7.00 – 8.00 pm
• Tues, Jan 18 – MANHATTAN – Borders, 10 Columbus Circle, 7.00 – 8.00 pm
• Thurs, Jan 20 – BOSTON – Barnes & Noble (Framingham) – 1 Worcester Rd, 7.00 -8.00 pm

Looking forward to meeting you if you can make it.

One proposal of the DREAM act is that the children of illegal immigrants should have a potential pathway to citizenship. This interests me because such children are otherwise condemned to a life of illegality as a result of no choice that they have made, which poses an interesting moral question for the rest of society.

Something I try to do in my fiction is to take the time to explore the human consequences of political decision-making, which I think is something that the news media would generally like to do, but rarely has the time and resource to achieve.

I’m similarly attracted to the work of American writers such as Dave Eggers, Philipp Meyer, Adam Haslett and Cara Hoffman who are writing about people in the real world that political and economic forces are shaping.

I drew the pictures myself. That’s why the protagonists are peas. Peas are quite easy to draw.

You can download it here as a free e-book for your Kindle, iPad, iPhone, Sony e-reader, or just to view on screen or print out. Do email it to friends with kids, re-post it, or whatever you need to do. Have fun, and a very happy Christmas!

Click here to download in PDF format (to view on screen or iPad or to print out)

Click here to download in EPUB format (for Sony e-Reader, iPad, iPhone)

Click here to download in MOBI format (for Kindle)

Thanks

Thanks to Bookswarm for helping me out with file formats & hosting. Thanks to @blackpooltower for testing the story on his kids. Thanks to @suziedoore and @BiscuitsBooks for encouragement and support as ever.

“Dickens voiced a code which was and on the whole still is believed in, even by people who violate it. It is difficult otherwise to explain why he could be both read by working people (a thing that has happened to no other novelist of his stature) and buried in Westminster Abbey.

When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.”

- “Charles Dickens” by George Orwell, 1939.

I’m especially happy about this as Seattle is one of my favourite cities on Earth or any other planet. Here is a short piece I wrote about the place last time I was there…