How Words Get Good: The Story of Making a Book

By Rebecca Lee

'Any bibliophile will find many enjoyable nuggets in this compendium of book chat' Stephen Poole, Guardian

'An engaging little eye-opener about the publishing business, full of tasty nuggets about books, writers and their editors' Sunday Times

'Enjoyable ... engaging ... insightful' Independent


Once upon a time, a writer had an idea. They wrote it down. But what happened next?

Join Rebecca Lee, professional text-improver, as she embarks on a fascinating journey to find out how words get from an author's brain to finished, printed books. She'll reveal the dark arts of ghostwriters, explore the secret world of literary agents and uncover the hidden beauty of typesetting. Along the way, her quest will be punctuated by a litany of little-known (but often controversial) considerations that make a big impact: ellipses, indexes, hyphens, esoteric points of grammar and juicy post-publication corrections. After all, the best stories happen when it all goes wrong.

From foot-and-note disease to the town of Index, Missouri - turn the page to discover how books get made and words get good.*

* Or, at least, better

• Language: English
• Publisher: Profile Books
• Release date: Mar 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781782837596

Rebecca Lee

Rebecca Lee is an editorial manager at Penguin Random House. She's spent twenty years managing hundreds of high-profile books from delivery of manuscript to finished copies, signing off millions of words as fit to go to print with only the occasional regret.

Book preview

HOW WORDS GET BORN

‘Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.’

Cicero

When you work in publishing, it can feel as if everyone you meet is writing a book. And if they aren’t writing one, they are asking your advice on how to write one, how to make one better, or if you’re thinking about writing one yourself. But this is what feeds the Gutenberg Galaxy. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that ‘Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.’ And that ‘one person’ can only come to us through what a writer allows us to see. But every word, and the story behind its birth, is a clue.

Ernest Hemingway described the process of writing in A Moveable Feast in these terms: ‘The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.’ E. L. Doctorow’s take was slightly different: ‘I have found one explanation that seems to satisfy people. I tell them it’s like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ I like to think these explanations demonstrate the spectrum of how words get born. From the enviable animus of a story that is ‘writing itself’ to one that’s gradually revealed like the next few metres of tarmac on a late-night car journey, how does being an author work?

Many books attempt to tackle the question of what writing is, and how it happens. It’s a vast topic: on Amazon, searching ‘how to write’ throws up more than 60,000 titles on the subject. Since the dawn of time, humans have enjoyed telling stories – and those stories have followed predictable patterns. In fact, the pattern of the story – its structure – was sometimes more important than the author. For a long time, authors were generally anonymous – they retold and embellished classical stories rather than inventing new ones (a process that still happens today), and it didn’t matter who was doing the telling – only that the story was absorbing.

One of the earliest and most enduring story structures was the epic: a long narrative poem in a time set outside the author’s own, which described the extraordinary lives and events of humans encountering gods or superhuman forces. Epics evolved into poems of courtly love and romance, then into travel literature and stories about conquests, with the same themes and structures appearing again and again, and laying down the foundations of what eventually became the novel as they did so. That’s why, in this section, I have chosen to focus on a few key ways of telling stories: these recurring structures and ways of writing tell us a lot about how words get good.

THE BEAUTIFUL SHAPE OF STORIES: AUTHORS

Man in hole: what to write

In his autobiography Palm Sunday, American novelist Kurt Vonnegut explained that his ‘prettiest contribution to culture’ had been his master’s thesis in anthropology, ‘which was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun’. So simple was it that Vonnegut was able to explain the concept of the thesis in one sentence: ‘The fundamental idea is that stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads.’

Stories, as Vonnegut says, have simple shapes, which can be plotted on a graph (overleaf) by humans – or computers. If you search on YouTube for ‘The Shape of Stories’ (the title of his thesis), you’ll be able to watch just over four minutes of him drawing (and explaining) some of these story shapes on a blackboard.

Vonnegut uses one axis to represent fortune, good and bad – the y-axis – and the x-axis represents the progression of a story from beginning to end. If you’re wondering what the ∞ in the ‘Cinderella’ graph means, it’s there to show unending good fortune.

‘I have tried to bring scientific thinking to literary criticism and there has been very little gratitude for this,’ said Vonnegut in a lecture on the topic. But we should be grateful. Who could resist the simple but elegant story shape described by the line on the graph labelled ‘Man in hole’? As Vonnegut says in ‘The Shape of Stories’, it doesn’t necessarily need to be a man, and he doesn’t have to be in a hole – but we can all relate to and follow the structure of a story where the protagonist loses his good fortune by encountering some sort of depression (literal or figurative), and then against the odds finds a way to escape it. The plot is as old as storytelling, and structure is what provides the shape of that descent and escape, using words as the scaffolding.

The shape of stories

Sentences and paragraphs in a book arrange the author’s meaning for the reader. The patterns that words follow once they are born, and the way we organise them, help them to convey something useful, interesting or emotionally involving.

When we begin the adventure of reading, we do so immersed in a cultural and sociological context – we experience how stories work as we learn to read when we are young. If the structure that we intuitively expect is not there we have to work hard to follow the story – or the argument – and we start to feel lost. Without structure, there would be no logical direction of travel, no plot for a reader, and no sense of adventure or suspense. Words would be scattered about with no shape to them at all: structure is what helps a writer guide a reader along the path of their words.

In The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, Christopher Booker analyses and breaks down stories into … well, seven basic plots. They are: ‘Overcoming the monster’, ‘Rags to riches’, ‘The quest’, ‘Voyage and return’, ‘Comedy’, ‘Tragedy’ and ‘Rebirth’. The book took him thirty-four years to write, which means his own story might fit into ‘The quest’, or perhaps by the end, ‘Overcoming the monster’. What these seven plots have in common is that they present a dramatic turning point which creates a conflict that must be resolved, which gives them a beginning, middle and end that we can follow and understand, with a sense of satisfaction. We set out on a journey, are presented with a problem, and then there is resolution. What could be more pleasing than that?

Some genres of writing have even more specific rules: during the golden age of detective fiction (broadly, the 1920s and 1930s in England), mysteries were considered to be games that the reader could play along with, and hope to solve. In this way, the reader was an active participant in the plot, and writers of these types of stories understood that part of their job as author was to fulfil this expectation.

As Ronald Knox,* author of a number of detective stories, wrote, ‘A detective story must have as its main interest the unravelling of a mystery; a mystery whose elements are clearly presented to the reader at an early stage in the proceedings, and whose nature is such as to arouse curiosity, a curiosity which is gratified at the end.’ If the author didn’t play by the rules, then the mystery couldn’t be solved by the reader, and dissatisfaction with the storyline would ensue. The book would, in some important way, have failed.

Telling the story backwards

But, of course, rules – literary or otherwise – are there to be broken. This chapter started by looking at Kurt Vonnegut’s ideas about predictable story structures. But Vonnegut often played with and subverted those very notions. In Slaughterhouse-Five, part of the plot is viewed backwards by Billy Pilgrim, the unreliable narrator:

It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

Despite these words being used to describe the exact reverse of the story we might be expecting, there is still a structure to them which allows us to follow along. It’s simply ‘Man in hole’ flipped upside down in order to make a point about the madness of war. Pleasingly, it manages to do so while also being rather uplifting. And as Vonnegut explained in his lectures on the topic of structure in stories: ‘The story is Man in hole … somebody gets into trouble, gets out of it again. It is not accidental that the line ends up higher than where it began. This is encouraging to readers.’

Below the waterline: How to write

One of the difficulties in storytelling is how and when you reveal things. Most fiction depends at some point on suspense – will our hero ever escape from the hole? – or the reader finding out something about the characters, or a situation being revealed. When you write fiction, you often suffer from the curse of knowledge: you know what’s going to happen next, but your reader doesn’t. The clues you leave, what you show, and when, can’t be too oblique – or too obvious. To structure fiction successfully you may have to do the opposite of structuring for non-fiction – by leaving things out and respecting that the reader will, through careful attention to your words, be able to work out what is happening. That’s why fiction writers will often rely on ambiguity, an unreliable narrator, inference and metaphor to conceal elements of a story – and to allow the reader to make their own leaps in understanding what is happening.

William Thackeray wrote of Vanity Fair that:

There are things we do and know perfectly well in Vanity Fair, though we never speak them … In describing this syren [Becky Sharp], singing and smiling, coaxing and cajoling, the author, with modest pride, asks his readers all around, has he once forgotten the laws of politeness, and showed the monster’s hideous tail above water? No! Those who like may peep down under waves that are pretty transparent, and see it writhing and twirling, diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping amongst bones, or curling round corpses; but above the water-line, I ask, has not everything been proper, agreeable, and decorous?

Thackeray’s idea of what is hidden below the waterline – that we know to be true, even without the words there to tell us – is echoed by Ernest Hemingway. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway elaborated on his own theory of literary omission – known as the iceberg theory:

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

Words must be conceived thoughtfully and birthed precisely for maximum narrative impact. The writing must be strong and true enough that even without saying what is happening, the reader knows. ‘A few things I have found to be true. If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. If you leave or skip something because you do not know it, the story will be worthless. The test of any story is how very good the stuff that you, not your editors, omit,’ explained Hemingway in ‘The Art of the Short Story’. This is the essence of how words get good: knowing which to leave out.

Five write a book in five days

In Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading, Lucy Mangan writes that ‘When you are young, even if you like it and are good at it, reading is hard. It is important to have somewhere you can go and know that your efforts are guaranteed to be rewarded. You need a satisfying story and an unbroken contract of delivery from your author.’ That’s why, particularly when we are children, we love series of books that create a familiar, comfortable world that we can retreat to time and time again – the knowledge that what we expect to happen will happen adds greatly to the pleasure of these word-worlds. Familiar characters and themes are what we crave – and writers know this. They too probably enjoy returning to these familiar and comforting anchors when they sit down to write.

‘I shut my eyes for a few minutes, with my portable typewriter on my knee – I make my mind a blank and wait – and then, as clearly as I would see real children, my characters stand before me in my mind’s eye … The first sentence comes straight into my mind, I don’t have to think of it – I don’t have to think of anything.’

This was Enid Blyton describing her creative process. Blyton is estimated to have written 760 books over the course of a fifty-year career. She believed she could tap into what she called her ‘under-mind’ to find inspiration for her copious output (which does sound enticing), but as her biographer Barbara Stoney suggests, this method had its drawbacks. Blyton told her husband that ‘While her characters were being established … they would walk about in her head, take over her dreams and give her little rest until she had got back to her typewriter the following day.’ In addition to her characters invading her headspace, this stream-of-consciousness way of writing, and the volume of her output, meant that, unsurprisingly, she often plagiarised her own work. She was also troubled by persistent rumours that she employed a stable of ghostwriters to work for her, and in 1956 she sued a librarian for saying that not all the books with her name on the cover were written by her.

Enid Blyton usually wrote between 6,000 and 10,000 words a day. Those who have never picked up and read a Famous Five or Secret Seven adventure would still probably recognise the Blyton formula: fast-paced, action-driven, with complete moral certainty (her heroes and villains are clearly signposted), excitement and escapism, without loss of life or real jeopardy.

This use of formula is why Blyton was able to be so prolific, and possibly why she is so open to parody, in forms such as Five Go Gluten Free, Five on Brexit Island and Five Go On A Strategy Away Day. The covers of these spin-offs, like her own books, feature her official signature – Blyton was an early, and devoted, proponent of presenting herself as a brand. Not everyone was a fan: Blyton was banned by the BBC for almost thirty years (from 1936 until 1963, when she finally appeared on Woman’s Hour), with one BBC employee writing: ‘It really is odd to think that this woman is a bestseller. It is all such very small beer.’ In ‘The Blyton Line’, psychologist Michael Woods gives his rather damning view on her methods of writing:

Enid Blyton has no moral dilemmas and her books satisfy children because they present things clearly in black and white with no confusing intermediate shades of grey. For the adult of course this is what makes life interesting; for the child ambiguity is untenable. The reason Enid Blyton was able to write so much … was because she did not have to make any effort to think herself back into childhood or wrestle with her conscience.

Yet the scaffolding of an expected structure is a reassuring handhold when we set out across the Gutenberg Galaxy, and surely part of the reason Blyton’s books remain bestsellers today. For children learning to read, formulaic storytelling is a comfort and an encouragement – we may read to discover new worlds, but having found one we like, we want to explore it further. We stick with what we know. And having taken up the habit and comfort of familiar plots, we often carry it with us into adulthood.

00 Secret 7: Formulas

‘I write for about three hours in the morning … and I do another hour’s work between six and seven in the evening. I never correct anything and I never go back to see what I have written … By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day.’

Ian Fleming used our natural love of formulaic writing to his advantage. As we have seen, be it romance or detective fiction, there are rules for the writer to follow, and sticking to them forms the unbroken contract of delivery between reader and author. And they can also help authors get on with the business of actually writing.

Fleming had enormous success with his James Bond stories, which he described as ‘thrillers designed to be read as literature’. He wrote them using a formula which applied not just to how he wrote, but to what he wrote. Writing your book at GoldenEye* in ‘the gorgeous vacuum of a Jamaican holiday’, as Fleming described his three-hours-a-day writing life, is surely authorial nirvana. Stick to the formula, 2,000 words a day, don’t trouble yourself with corrections, sell 30 million copies of your books while you’re alive, and double that after your death.† Simple.

In his 2012 introduction to Live and Let Die, Andrew Taylor writes that ‘It’s the first of Fleming’s books to use what was to become his classic formula. Bond is sent to an exotic location to deal with an amoral and physically unusual villain with limitless wealth and a superhuman lust for power. A beautiful woman serves as both plot device and trophy.’ As well as being physically unusual, the way Fleming chose to name his villains was also out of the ordinary. Auric Goldfinger was named after modernist architect Ernö Goldfinger, whose work Fleming hated (Goldfinger took legal advice upon the publication of Goldfinger, which prompted Fleming to threaten to rename the character ‘Goldprick’), while Hugo Drax, the villain in Moonraker, was named after the excessively monikered Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, an acquaintance of Fleming’s.

In 1966 Umberto Eco wrote an essay titled ‘Narrative Structures in Fleming’, which outlined how the novels were ‘fixed as a sequence of moves inspired by the code and constituted according to a perfectly rearranged scheme’. What were those moves?

1.  M moves and gives a task to Bond

2.  Villain moves and appears to Bond (perhaps in vicarious form)

3.  Bond moves and gives a first check to Villain or Villain gives first check to Bond

4.  Woman moves and shows herself

5.  Bond takes Woman (possesses her or begins her seduction)

6.  Villain captures Bond (with or without Woman, or at different moments)

7.  Villain tortures Bond (with or without Woman)

8.  Bond beats Villain (kills him, or kills his representative or helps at their killing)

9.  Bond, convalescing, enjoys Woman, whom he then loses

This formulaic style of writing words, though, is what has made the Bond brand and Fleming’s work both enduring and durable. In a 1964 interview Fleming said:

‘I’m too interested in surface things, and I’m too interested in maintaining a fast pace, in writing at speed.* I’m afraid I shouldn’t have the patience to delve into the necessary psychological introspection and historical background. But in the end, I must say, I’m very happy writing as I do. And I greatly enjoy knowing that other people, quite intelligent people, find my books amusing and entertaining. But I’m not really surprised, because they entertain and amuse me too.’

As well as amusement and entertainment, Fleming’s formula presumably also meant that he only had to spend a few hours a day doing the heavy lifting of writing, and rather more enjoying the cool breeze flowing through his jalousie blinds.

While Fleming aimed for 2,000 words a day, his formula has had a substantial afterlife, too – so far, new adventures for Bond have been provided by Kingsley Amis (writing as Robert Markham), John Gardner, Raymond Benson, Jeffrey Deaver, William Boyd, Sebastian Faulks and Anthony Horowitz, all benefiting from the proven success of the 007 formula.

Even as Bond puts himself in the way of mortal danger on every outing, we know that eventually we’ll reach ‘Bond, convalescing, enjoys Woman, whom he then loses’. Because it is only once Bond has convalesced and lost the woman that the adventure can begin again.

The Secret of the Stratemeyer Syndicate

Does this subheading sound a bit Blytonesque? She may have been a one-woman writing machine, but Enid Blyton had nothing on Edward Stratemeyer. When he died in 1930 the New York Times reported that his Rover Boys series had sold more than 5 million copies. But Stratemeyer was also responsible for even more millions of book sales: as well as The Rover Boys, he dreamt up The Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift, Baseball Joe, The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and The Dana Girls. The Nancy Drew series alone has sold over 80 million books.

How did Stratemeyer do it? He discovered, as an article about him in Fortune magazine published four years after his death pointed out, that ‘the reading capacity of the American adolescent was limitless’. He began his career at a magazine publisher’s called Smith & Smith, where he was asked to finish the incomplete manuscripts of Horatio Alger* after he died. Stratemeyer completed from Alger’s notes, or invented himself, eleven volumes of stories published under Alger’s name. This success led to him establishing a number of series of books for adolescent readers, which he initially wrote himself. One man could not keep up with the limitless demand he had identified, however, and Stratemeyer realised that to satisfy his readers he would have to draft in help. Although the series Stratemeyer established had an ‘author’ named on the cover, they were in fact the work of a syndicate.

We are programmed to think of the author as a lone genius, tapping away in isolation and channelling a vision that is solely theirs, but Stratemeyer’s books show that’s not the only model of authorship: the formula can be so effective it doesn’t much matter who the author is, as long as the book conforms to its own terms of reference.

By 1910 Stratemeyer’s syndicate was officially incorporated, and had a streamlined system: he would think up a new series, then for each volume would develop an outline that was passed on to a contracted writer, who would turn it into a 200-page book. This is a system still used today: James Patterson, a prodigious literary figure and the world’s bestselling author (at least 114 New York Times bestsellers), manages to sustain his output year after year by working with a stable of co-authors. His name looms large on his covers, but Patterson doesn’t actually write his books. Instead, he provides a detailed outline, then hires someone else to do the actual writing, while providing feedback for them.

Stratemeyer would carefully schedule appointments at his office so that his writers would never meet, and once the book was written he would revise and proofread each one, and then send it on to a publisher. Crucially, the syndicate, not the writer, owned the copyright of each volume. One Stratemeyer writer called Albert Svenson described the formula that syndicate writers were expected to follow: ‘A low death rate but plenty of plot. Verbs of action, and polka-dotted with exclamation points and provocative questions. No use of guns by the hero. No smooching. The main character introduced on page one and a slambang mystery or peril set up. Page one used to be fifteen lines, and now it’s eighteen.’

In Nabokov’s Favourite Word is Mauve, Ben Blatt analyses the final sentence of each chapter in a sample of The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew titles. In The Hardy Boys, 71 per cent of chapter-ending sentences finish with what Blatt calls marks of ‘obvious excitement (!)’ or ‘obvious mystery (?)’. These cliff hanger chapter endings,* supplied to a formula by a syndicate, are what have kept readers turning the pages for nearly a hundred years. (If you looked at the publishing output of Carolyn Keene, the ‘author’ of the Nancy Drew books, you’d see that she was active as a writer from 1930 until the present day, and that Nancy has evolved from the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories via The Nancy Drew Files, Nancy Drew on Campus, Girl Detective to finally a series of graphic novels in which Nancy appears in manga-style illustrations and drives a hybrid car.)

While we might think that good words are all about originality, creativity and groundbreaking new literary devices (indeed, literary fiction is reviewed, praised and awarded prizes for its stylistic experimentation and originality), much of our enjoyment of reading comes from words that provide the balm of the familiar, the comforting, and that meet our expectations – and that keep us turning the pages with obvious excitements and mysteries. Readers know what they are getting, and that’s just how they like it. Not only is it satisfying when we are reading, Patterson, Blyton, Fleming and Stratemeyer show us how commercially successful this kind of literary factory farming can also be.

*Knox also came up with a ‘Decalogue’ of commandments for detective fiction; my favourite is the very specific no. 3, which states that no more than one secret room or passage is allowable in a story.

*Yes, you too can stay at GoldenEye. According to its website: ‘Without the slightest experience but with the greatest self-confidence, Fleming designed the house himself. As a typically dogmatic Englishman, he decided there would be no windows – just customary Jamaican jalousie blinds to let in the air and sun. And of course, he was right: The breezes at GoldenEye are a delight, all hours of the day, all times of the year.’

†Fleming’s last words after what would prove his final fatal heart attack in 1964 were to the ambulance crew that came out to him: ‘I am sorry to trouble you chaps. I don’t know how you get along so fast with the traffic on the roads these days.’

*Talking of writing at speed, here is John Self on Georges Simenon, creator of the legendary sleuth Maigret and author of more than five hundred novels: ‘Simenon’s productivity is legendary: he wrote one chapter a day, without interruption, and if he had to stop working on a book for more than 48 hours, for example through illness, he threw it away. He completed most of his novels in ten or eleven days, editing them only to cut, cut, cut anything that he deemed too literary. It’s reported that Alfred Hitchcock once telephoned him only to be told that Simenon was incommunicado as he had just begun a new novel. That’s all right, said Hitchcock, I’ll wait.’

*Horatio Alger (1832–1899) had published roughly a hundred ‘rags-to-riches’ stories by the time he died. Alger scholar Gary Scharnhorst describes Alger’s writing style as ‘often laughable’ and ‘anachronistic’, but more than half his books contain references to Shakespeare, as well as allusions to John Milton and Cicero.

*According to Blatt, Enid Blyton’s ‘obvious cliff hanger mark’ rating is 83 per cent.

‘SINGERS OF STITCHED WORDS’: GHOSTWRITERS

Did Homer exist? This is one strand of the Homeric Question – an academic discipline that attempts to answer the question of who Homer was, who really composed the Iliad and the Odyssey, and how and when they were written.

If he did exist, was he one individual or should ‘Homeric’ refer to an entire group and culture of oral storytelling? Although we don’t know for sure that Homer existed as a person, we do know that a society of poets called the Homeridae did. Some scholars believe that the name Homer was back-extracted from the name of this society – they claimed to be ‘children of Homer’, hence the name. Homeridae means ‘sons of hostages’, so some have theorised that they were the descendants of prisoners of war. As their loyalty was suspect, they weren’t sent into battle; instead, their job was to commit to memory the epic oral poetry of the area so that in a time before literacy it would be preserved. The Greek poet Pindar referred to the Homeridae as the ‘singers of stitched words’ – a quite beautiful description.

It’s likely the poems attributed to Homer are based on oral culture – they consist of repeated phrases and verses that would have been memorised – the telltale formula of singer-poets throughout history. It wasn’t until the eighth century BC that these pieces were refined and standardised, possibly by one man called Homer. But does it matter who is telling us a story – do we need to know who an author is? Does it add to our enjoyment of the words, or does it skew our view of them before we have even turned a page?

‘Anonymous was a woman’

From the Pauline Epistles in the New Testament (fourteen books are explicitly stated to be written by Paul the Apostle, but claims have been made from Eusebius onwards that Paul was not the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews) to Primary Colors, a 1996 book based on Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, deliberately withholding the name of the author can help generate publicity, let writers speak more candidly, and, in some cases, just allow them to enjoy creating one giant literary mystery. It’s actually far more difficult than it used to be to conceal your identity: the author of Primary Colors wasn’t able to stay anonymous for long, as the book was subjected to stylometric analysis by a professor of linguistic style and then handwriting analysis by the Washington Post, which forced the columnist Joe Klein to admit he was the ‘Anonymous’ of the cover.

Hidden identities have been around