It's only a fiver

To celebrate their first birthday, those lovely people at Unbound are offering a £5 voucher towards a pledge on any of their books. That means you can help A Box of Birds to be published for only a fiver (the minimum pledge is £10). That's the price of a London pint (I think; I never carry cash in London). What you'll be doing is helping me with a book I've been working on for more than a decade, and which now finally has a chance to see the light of day.

If you have any queries about how the process works, this blog post will help. If you'd like to read a summary of the conversations that have been going on around the book (including coverage in Wired, the Telegraph, the Independent and BBC Radio 4), please read this. You can also read what some wonderful writers have been saying about the book.

If you've already pledged, thank you (though please feel free to pledge again as a gift). If you haven't subscribed yet, now is your chance. The £5 voucher is available to anyone, but only until 12 June. All the details are here.

A Box of Birds: update

A Box of Birds is now 60% funded. Lots of people have pledged support to make this book happen, but there is still a way to go. Here are some things you can do to help.

1. Spread the word. I have been doing a lot of publicity around the book, and there are plenty of ways of getting into the conversation. I’ve tweeted about it a lot, and my Facebook page also has links for easy sharing.

I followed up my interview with Jonah Lehrer in a piece for Radio 4’s ‘All in the Mind’, which you can listen to again here. The book has had a second pre-publication quote from the acclaimed novelist Sara Maitland, which you can read here.

I have written about the Unbound crowd-funding process here, and answered some common questions about the process works. I wrote about the challenges of combining being a scientist and a writer in this blog post for the Independent. I have also written a blog post specifically about how neuroscience explains motivations, and how novelists can make use of that knowledge.

I was interviewed about the book for the magazine Notes from the Underground. The book was also mentioned in this piece in the Daily Telegraph.

I’ll be doing an event at the Hay Festival on Tuesday 5 June. Looking further ahead, I’ll be in conversation about fiction and science with the American writer Ben Marcus at the Edinburgh festival on 11 August, and I’ll speaking about the book at Medicine Unboxed: Belief in Cheltenham in November.

2. Persuade a friend. If everybody who has pledged for the book could persuade one more person, I would quickly reach the target. You can find out who has already pledged support by going here. For those who want to try before they buy, the first chapter of the book is free to read at the pledge page, and the second chapter has just been published too. The third chapter is posted in the Shed, to which only subscribers have access.

3. Pledge again. Unbound make beautiful books which are perfect gifts. This gift is even more special because you can put the recipient’s name in the back of the book. Supporters’ names will appear in every subsequent edition, including the trade edition which will be published by Faber next year (if the Unbound edition reaches its target) and any foreign editions and translations. Remember that the Unbound edition will appear some time before the Faber one, so those who subscribe now get an exclusive preview.

It’s easy to change the name that appears in the back of the book. Simply go into the Shed (as a subscriber you have access) and press the button at the right.

Thanks for your support. 

How do I pledge?

This crowd-funding business is new territory for all of us, so I thought I'd put together a few FAQs to help you decide.

This is one of those internet scams, isn't it? Not at all. The people behind Unbound are highly respected in the literary and media worlds. They have a sound business model and have already brought established writers like Terry Jones and Tibor Fischer into print, with Kate Mosse and Jonathan Meades set to follow soon. They make lovely books and publicise them well, and I want mine to be one of them.

What are the risks, then? There aren't any. You either get a beautiful book (and help a writer get back into doing what he loves most) or, if the project isn't funded, you get a full refund.

Why are you self-publishing? I'm not. If I were self-publishing I would be paying for my book to be printed. (Here's some more on how the Unbound model differs.) There are many reasons for taking the subscription-funding route, and one is that it gives me a chance to talk about why the book is important before it is actually published. (I've been doing that here and here.) There's nothing particularly new in the subscription-funding model; it was big in the eighteenth century and Unbound are simply reviving it for the modern era.

What's this about getting your name in the back of the book? When you pledge for a book, your name is recorded and entered into the subscription list, which will then be printed in the back of every edition that appears.

So can I change the name to make it a gift? Certainly. Once you have pledged, there's a button on the right which allows you to change the name in the back of the book. Change this to the name of the gift recipient, and their name will be printed in the back of every edition of the novel. How's that for literary immortality?

Am I going to get loads of junk mail? No. You have to register with an email address so that Unbound know who you are. They send a weekly newsletter, but you can easily opt out of that. That's all.

It's OK, I'll just wait for the paperback. Er, no. There will be no paperback unless the project is funded. Help me to cross the finishing line and there will be a subsequent trade edition in partnership with Faber (due next year), with the potential for foreign editions and translations. Once the book is published by Unbound (in August, if I get funded on schedule), it will automatically be eligible for prizes and various other good things. But for that to happen, I need your support. You can do everything you need to do here. Thanks so much.

The pull of the story

A few weeks ago I went to London to film the pitch for my novel, A Box of Birds. This will be my first novel for some time (my debut, The Auctioneer, was published way back in 1999), and so it was a big moment for me. I was meeting John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, to talk to him about the themes of the book. We met at Paramount, the restaurant at the top of Centre Point in Soho. The pitch was filmed (by the wonderful and multitalented Laura Kidd) against the extraordinary backdrop of London viewed from 33 floors up. You can see the results here.

It was a wide-ranging, enlivening conversation, as all my chats with John are. I got the chance to explain how A Box of Birds is my way of taking on a fundamental question: how we should live our lives, if we accept (as modern neuroscience asks us to) that we are no more than complex systems of connections. With Yvonne, I wanted to write the story of the first materialist in fiction. That statement probably seems over-bold and certainly needs some qualification, as there are plenty of other novels that touch on themes of neuroscientific materialism. But I don’t think novelists have gone far enough in exploring the implications of this philosophy for their fictional characters. I’ve written more about this debate here, and there’ll be lots more in the weeks to come. If the book is funded, it will be published in the autumn.

In a way, the most difficult question was the last one. ‘What makes you keep doing it?’ John asked me. At an emotional level, I have no doubt about the answer, but it’s hard to put it into words. I have always written fiction—I had a complete draft of a novel at the age of nine—and it’s not too melodramatic to say that I have dedicated my life to it. In one sense it’s the most natural thing in the world for me to do. I suspect that what John was really asking was: What makes you keep doing it, when you could be doing other things? I have a part-time career as an academic, after all: why isn’t that enough?

If I knew the answer to that, I would have solved a basic riddle about human creativity. What makes us want to tell stories? What do the counterfactuals of fiction give us that the realities of science don’t?

There is much to say on this topic, but here's one idea to start with. Looking for the commonalities between science and writing is not a new endeavour, and people before me have considered this relationship very fruitfully. (Here's one great example, and an equally interesting response.) When I'm doing science, I'm trying to go from the specificities of data to theories and principles that can apply more generally. Writers do that too. They look for the particular that can speak to the universal, the part that can stand for the whole.

In some ways, though, fiction has more to do with engineering. When you write a novel, you are building a model and then putting it in a wind tunnel. You're looking to see how the stresses of events impact upon your characters: how they deform them, and draw out their resiliences. You always start with a character, I think, a character in a situation... and then you put your model down on the bench and see how it runs. For me, with this book, that was about saying 'What if you put a materialist into a story? How would she behave when stuff started to happen? How would her view of the world, and of herself, change?' I honestly don't think we can understand the true meaning of neuroscience from within the discipline. We have to look at how it functions in the real world, how it changes our understanding.

So that's one reason why I do fiction alongside science. In the end, I'm not going to be able to give a definitive answer to the question that John asked me, except to the extent of knowing what these things mean to me personally. That’s the bit that’s hard to put into words, and it’s what I tried to explain to John. I’m less of a person when I’m not writing fiction. Without it, I just don't understand things so well. 

Memory Week

Happy 2012 to everyone. This week is Memory Week at the Guardian and Observer, and I've had great fun being involved.

The main event has been an online memory experiment designed by Jon Simons and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge. This is already looking like it could become the biggest memory experiment ever conducted, so please join in. You can hear me talking about the study on BBC Tees (at around 1:50 on this link). You can also read the press release here. Jon's latest blog post gives some more background to the study.

On Wednesday, I did a live Q&A on memory on the Guardian's website (1-2pm). Comments are now closed but I hope to keep the conversation going on Twitter.

Next Saturday, the Guardian will be publishing a free guide called 'Make the Most of Your Memory'. On Sunday, the Observer will be publishing another free guide incorporating memory tests and exercises. The supplements will also be available online.

A seven-year-old's Saturday

A chapter in Pieces of Light is going to deal with the use of SenseCam as a memory aid for people with amnesia. SenseCam is a little camera worn around the neck which takes pictures of the world as you move through it. Various sensors embedded in the device detect movement and changes in light and temperature, and trigger the taking of a picture through its wide-angle lens. I borrowed one for a week from the memory researcher Chris Moulin at the University of Leeds, and used it to perform my own memory experiment, described in the book.

I also thought it would be fun to let my seven-year-old try it out. He took it with him on a shopping trip one Saturday afternoon, and I assembled the resulting images into a timelapse movie. I think it gives a lovely insight into what the world might look like to a seven-year-old.

Barnes, his memory

Julian Barnes was announced last night as the winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sense of an Ending. In beautifully concise (and, controversially, rather readable) prose, the novel recounts the efforts of a middle-aged man to make sense of past relationships and their unintended consequences. I thought it was a worthy winner, and it's nice to see Barnes (three times an also-ran) getting the acclaim he deserves.

I jumped on this book when it came out because of several comments I had seen about its theme of memory. All novels are about memory, of course, but this one seemed to be taking seriously a reconstructive view of how we remember: the various ways in which who we are now can change how we make sense of what happened then. On the very first page, the protagonist Tony questions the reliability of his own testimony: 'This last isn't something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.'

And yet the well-documented unreliability of memory isn't quite as interesting to Barnes as its regular habits. When Tony hears about the existence of his late friend Adrian's diary, he wonders whether getting hold of it will dislodge his remembering from the ruts it has been stuck in. Reading Adrian's diary, he thinks, 'might disrupt the banal reiterations of memory. It might jump-start something—though I had no idea what' (p. 77).

Tony is struggling to uncover a truth about the past, and the fact that he always remembers things in the same way is an obstacle to progress. Barnes recognises, even celebrates, the slippery truth of memory, and sees Tony's infuriating constancy of memory as stemming from the habitual nature of his storytelling about the past, rather than from any object-like permanence of his memory representations. Remembering happens in the present moment, and each act of remembering is shaped and constrained by what has gone before. We create memory fictions—the same fictions—so many times over that they come to have a special kind of constancy. It's not that we're laying them down in some permanent store and repeatedly accessing their immutable truths. Rather, we make memories in the present tense, according to the needs of the present. If they tell the same story each time, it's because they are more like habits than things.

The Sense of an Ending presents the most sophisticated view of memory I have seen in fiction for a while, and it offers a nice antidote to descriptions of remembering that liken it to the loading of a mental DVD containing a faithful representation of a past event. On another occasion, the old-fashioned view of memory creeps in, such as when Tony complains (about one episode of forgetting) that 'my brain must have erased it from the record' (p. 119). Memory is not a tape recorder: it has neither a playback head nor a record one, and the analogy is as misleading as it is entrenched.

One of the most interesting parts of the novel describes how a shift in Tony's feelings towards his former lover’s parents unlocks new memories of their relationship:

But what if, even at a late stage, your emotions relating to those long-ago events and people change? … I don’t know if there’s a scientific explanation for this… All I can say is that it happened, and that it astonished me. 

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape, 2011), p. 120 

I would be the last to want to apply a reductionist method to understanding fiction that's as good as this, but these kinds of circumstance crop up frequently in the modern science of memory. As is the case in memories for trauma, changing your current interpretation of a past event can change the way you remember it. You recall the emotionality of an event differently, for example, according to whether you are asked to recall it from a first-person point of view (where you are more likely to focus on emotions and feelings) or from a third-person perspective (where you are more likely to concentrate on the actual facts of the matter) [1].

More than just being about memory, though, I think this novel is a return to one of Barnes' favourite themes: that of the self in time. As Tony comments right at the outset, 'we live in time—it holds us and moulds us—but I've never felt I understood it very well.' I recall (probably badly, through the dusty pane of memory) a passage from Barnes' first novel, Metroland, in which the narrator comments that everyone is born to fit best into a particular lifestage. Which means, he expands, that you can come across people in their teens who really would be more at home in their own lives if they were in their forties, so that when they eventually reach that age it's like a homecoming.

I'd love to back this up with a quotation, if anyone remembers it. Tony's problem is that he never quite works out where in his life he fits best. It was that sense of a self trying to find its place in time that struck me most about this memorable literary winner.

[1] Robinson, J. A., & Swanson, K. L. (1993). Field and observer modes of remembering. Memory, 1, 169-184.