Read all about it here – how an exhibition centre in London was packed with hopefuls eager to learn the secret of success as a novelist.
Everybody’s at it, apparently. In the evenings. On the train. On the kitchen table. In the road. Even at work, when no-one’s looking. Writing novels, that is.
They say that everyone has at least one book inside them. As I heard from one wag the other day, most people should keep their books that way — inside them — paraphrasing the epigram by Coleridge that “Swans sing before they die: ’twere no bad thing, should certain persons die before they sing”.
The report, on BBC Online, asks why people pour out their innermost souls in novels, especially nowadays, when aspiring novelists like me can get it off their chests in a blog, without all those long, lonely hours, and waiting on the (usually negative) responses from agents and publishers. The report, however, doesn’t answer that question, the question of why write a novel, except to offer the lame excuse of ‘because it’s there’.
The article also lays it on a bit thick about how hard it is to write a novel, how painful and how lonely, and the determination one needs to finish. Is it fun, they asked an aspiring novelist, at the end of his second and contemplating a third — “Is climbing a mountain an inch a day using only fingertips fun?”
Oh dear. Poor lambs. From this you’d think that we’re all masochists, or that the production of great literature requires a measure of suffering in a garret. When I wrote my first novel last year, after a decade and a half writing non-fiction almost exclusively, I found to my great surprise that it was among the most satisfying experiences I’d ever had.
Curiously, aspiring novelists seem keener to emphasize the misery of it rather than the joy, the exultation, the pure pleasure of writing and seeing your characters come alive on a page as you write. Perhaps such aspiring novelists wish to set themselves apart as a cadre of high-flown Sufferers for their Art, enjoying a pain too exquisite for us mere mortals to understand. Either that, or they don’t want even more aspirants to clog up an already overstuffed market.
Of course, only a scintillionth of all the novels that are written ever get published, but that doesn’t really matter. Lots of people enjoy (say) playing football, but never get to play at Wembley. Lots of people enjoy amateur dramatics who will never get to join the Royal Shakespeare Company. These people will no doubt say that yes, some work is required — fitness, practice, discipline and so on. Precisely the same is true for writing a novel.
And yet aspiring novelists often start with the attitude that their effort will be the next Harry Potter and the Revenge of the Gay Mutant Nazi Biker Hedgehogs of Doom, when participants in most amateur football matches are satisfied with a Sunday morning’s knockabout in the park, and are not disappointed when they aren’t immediately selected for the Arsenal.
Perhaps it is the aspect of privacy that sets novels apart — that they are the repositories for our deepest speculations, the scratches for all our itches that would be intolerable if presented in any way other than as fiction. Because they are private, like sex, but unlike football or am-dram, we become very precious about people reading them — even though that’s precisely what we want to happen. “Oh no,” says Cicely in The Importance of Being Earnest when someone wishes to read her diary: “You see, it is simply a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy.”
But one should never forget that despite the fact that a novel is intensely personal, it does — if it is any good — assume its own life. It is a mistake to take any opinion expressed in a novel by any of the characters and assume that the author should hold that same opinion. Characters in my novels — my first, and the one I’m now writing — get up to all sorts of things I hesitate to mention in polite society, even in this blog, but that’s really up to the characters in my novel, not me.
I suppose that one’s creations are like one’s children. As they grow, they can be the cause of intense pride, sleepless nights, toe-curling embarrassment, and excruciating pain. But when they’ve grown up, you have to let them go, make their own decisions. But the act of creating them? Now, there’s fun.
Waterstones have recently started a vote for the best book written in the last 25 years. I saw this advertised at the Waterstones in Woking, voted, and decided that I would try to work through the 75-or-so that I have not read yet.
One of these is ‘The Name of the Rose’. A quote in Umberto Eco’s introduction is appropriate to this blog:
“I transcribe my text with no concern for timeliness. In the years when I discovered the Abbe Vallet volume, there was a widespread conviction that one should write only out of a commitment to the present, in order to change the world. Now, after ten years or more the man of letters (restored to his loftiest dignity) can happily write out of a pure love of writing. And so I now feel free to tell, for sheer narrative pleasure, the story of Adso of Melk, and I am comforted and consoled in finding it immeasureably remote in time (now that the waking of reason has dispelled all the monsters that its sleep had generated), gloriously lacking in any relevance for our day, atemporally alien to our hopes and our certainties.”
Thanks for that link, Bronwen — I must look it up. Voting only for books written in the past 25 years means that The Lord Of The Rings doesn’t qualify (it would have soared to the top otherwise — naturally). The Name Of The Rose is super. And Eco is right — if you have a story, just tell it like it is, without following fads or fashions. This leads us to a conundrum, however. If publishers prefer to publish books they think the public will already like, by following in the wake of something new and successful, how does novelty ever become established? By authors who both write well, and refuse to compromise their style or vision by ratcheting it down to what people in marketing and sales can understand.
I went to the Waterstones site and voted for Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, unarguably one of the finest novels ever written. Good to see some books in Waterstones’ top 100 that aren’t literary fiction: Gibson’s Neuromancer, for example. But how anyone can rate Dawkins’ The God Delusion as a good book beats me. It’s lousy. Even atheists who subscribe to Dawkins’ views should read it and cringe.
I read The Remains of the Day last weekend and agree that it is brilliant; unfortunately I had not read it before voting! The book that got my vote was Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.
Am actually struggling a bit with The name of the rose…. He uses a lot of very big words and it is a bit tiresome to try to work out the latin… :) It is like being 12 again, this having to read with a dictionary beside me. The Pain of Reading. Oh dear.
Aha! Jonathan Strange is on my Amazon wish list. You are the third person to have recommended it to me enthusiastically, so perhaps I should take the plunge. I do know what you mean about The Name of the Rose. I found the academic density, and the feeling that one doesn’t quite know what he’s on about, part of the attraction. It’s as Tolkien (ah! Tolkien!) wrote about readers’ reactions to the glimpses of a deeper mythology beneath The Lord of the Rings: that many will find that these lend enchantment to the view, as it were, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s all a part of that literary depth — the sense that there are things going on that har only half glimpsed, barely grasped, just beyond understanding. Have you seen the film of The Name of the Rose? Just as brilliant as the book — but in entirely its own way.
One drunken evening many summers ago, myself and an English undergraduate friend created The Name of the Rose drinking game whilst watching (after a fashion) the film version. The rules, thankfully, have long since been forgotten.
I also loved Jonathan Strange. I’ve just picked up the accompanying book of short stories which, sadly, I haven’t had the chance to read yet, but I’m hoping they’ll be as much fun. It is certainly more portable, at least!