‘Have you read anything good lately?’
It’s such an innocent thing to be asked. So well-meaning. Yet each time a little voice inside me that wants to shriek – ‘NO! There’s NOTHING good. Nobody anywhere is writing ANYTHING that is ANY good at all. Except ME!’
(Here, ego. Down, ego. Good boy – have a biscuit. Now let me lead you back to your nice warm kennel and put these nice comfy shackles on you. And also your muzzle. There – now we’re happy, aren’t we?)
(Whimperwhimperwhimperwhimper.)
Some writers have great generosity of spirit. They can read what others have written, love it, talk sensibly about it and never worry about how it compares with efforts of their own. They are blessed and the world is blessed with them. But I guess that others – people in creative work of any kind – will know exactly what I mean here.
Three little furies that attend me when I read. None of them are very sensible but the last is more interesting than the others.
- I’m jealous. This is a bad book and it’s selling by the bucketload. Everyone says it’s bad, and still it sells. 80% of its sales are to people who wouldn’t normally have dreamed of buying it, but want to find out what the other 20% are making the fuss about. Boo!
- I’m afraid. This is a brilliant book. It’s witty and imaginative and character-driven in ways that I could never aspire to. Can I bear to read on?
- And I wouldn’t have done it like that!
Meaning?
If you spend time constructing stories, you are likely to read them differently. You look at the architecture as you go. You subject it to tests that other readers don’t think necessary. You can often see what’s coming before you’re meant to. This is true of all kinds of storytelling. My family despair of my ability to sit still through a TV drama. I tend to walk out after ten minutes saying things like ‘Call me when she’s found out he’s being unfaithful to her.’ My son will tell me about a film he’s seen and when he’s halfway through I will tell him how it finishes. Strangely unwelcome, this.
What this is about is that I want to take control. I want to wrest the story away from the teller and do it my way. I’m like the person in the passenger seat who can’t stop pressing their foot to the floor whenever the car they’re being driven in approaches a bend in the road. It’s a bad, bad, deeply ingrained habit..
But it does have an upside. If I’m interested enough in the story then I start to turn it over in my mind. I ditch the clichés, take the stuff that’s fresh, and think it through into a story of my own (no doubt adding more clichés along the way). And maybe – one day – something like that story will get told in the way I want to tell it.
I do read, and I do enjoy reading. Mostly. I brush away my insecurities and carry on. And sometimes there’s this bonus, that I’ll find something that I can work with: meat for the beast in the back of my mind.