Introduction
In his most successful and prolific period, Joe Orton wrote in his diary that he had just finished a draft of a new play, and now he was putting it under his bed for six months in order to let it ‘mature’. When I first read that I wondered if he thought that the thing would somehow improve of its own accord, fermenting and gathering dust in the dark like a bottle of wine. I realized that he must have known that his market value was on the up and up and the improvement he was actually expecting was in financial returns for a new piece of work.
Now, though, I think he also meant that, given six months, he himself would have changed. He would be able to come back to that manuscript with fresh eyes and ears. He would be coming to it almost as another person; as a reader again.
Is it true that after seven years none of our skin cells are actually the same? That we’ve regenerated completely, but the old pattern still holds, so that we look the same, only older?
I think that process must be even faster with writers. The dead cells flake and drop off and a newer, sensitive skin comes up with far more regularity than every seven years. We are the continually changing product of everything we see, read, experience. We can’t help but be different when we sit down to start work on something already started.
In his essay, David Lodge talks about starting the writing day with reading back what you wrote yesterday. You have to anchor yourself back into the world of your story, poem, play. You have to get the feeling back of that world and strive after consistency. You have to hold the whole atmosphere of it in your head and push on, staying true to the parameters of that vision. This is something you can only do by reading yourself over and over.
You have to ration yourself, however. You can’t read back from page one every day, especially if it’s a novel you are working on. As the piece of writing becomes longer, more and more of your day would be spent reading and less would be spent writing new stuff. You have to write new stuff: it’s good for your self-esteem.
If you read everything from page one every day before starting again, reaching the end would be as impossible for you as it is for the frog who takes half jumps from his lily pad to the other side of the pond. As his jumps get fractionally smaller, he is doomed never to reach dry land.
So you have to push away from the beginning. It’s just like going to sea. It’s dangerous and you might drown. A good idea is to set yourself a fixed amount of rereading – a certain number of pages, say – and they will alter every day, progressing along with you. You need to use the fresh rereading of these pages as a barge pole to shove yourself off from your home shore, and to punt yourself into clear water.
Rereading yourself as you go along is vital, but don’t let yourself get bogged down in it. Sometimes you have to leave sections of your work a little rougher, a bit more untamed, in order to move on and get on with the rest of it. You can’t give it all a final polish as you go on – the end isn’t in sight yet. You don’t know what you might have to do to those pieces yet. When the whole thing is substantially there – when the whole shape and arc and structure of the piece is complete and you’ve made the journey to the end – that’s the time to go back and read it, all in one piece. That’s when you can think about the process of final polishings.
Who’d make the parts for a car and polish each of them to a gleam before putting them all together?
It’s a two-way process – reading back and pushing ahead. But you have to do both. If all you do is read back and minutely revise, you’ll end up with less and less every day. If you push forward remorselessly, without ever reading anything, you will have something that is disastrously inconsistent in tone and vision. It would be a great patchwork of yourself in different states of mind, with no clarity or continuity between individual parts. Without a certain amount of rereading it’s a mess and quickly falls apart.
My heroine in this respect is Colette who, working in her special room, writing on pale blue sheets of foolscap, would each day produce her six pages – rigorously, energetically – and, at the end of the day, upon reading back, robustly tear up page six. She knew that the energy would have fizzled by page six – and that the first five were vintage, authentic Colette.
Set yourself suitable limits like this. You can’t write the whole thing in one unbroken day. No one has the stamina for that. You have to leave off in order to do the rest of life – eat, sleep, see other people. But you don’t have to carry the whole thing in your head between times, either, so that sitting down to write again involves the Herculean task of lifting up the great big rock of your work and weighing it all up again, looking at it from every angle. Read back only a certain amount of it; get the flavour again, get the mood. Prepare to launch off again across the wild water.
To me, reading back isn’t just about reading words already on the page. It is also about constructing diagrams on the walls for the shape of the piece of work. It is about consulting notebooks, scribbled pages, file cards and journals. All of this extra material ought to be arranged around you, like a painter has their messy paraphernalia strewn in their studio: sketches, photos, brushes, palettes, knives. These are all tools to get you back into the textual world you are creating.
A diagram constructed on the wall can show you the whole shape of a story or novel or play. It can illustrate the arcs of development and progress your characters make, or it could record the projection of tangled lines where they meet, cross over, sleep together or exchange vital information. You might have a graph charting the downfalls and triumphs of your central protagonist, or a Chinese-box diagram – boxes within boxes – to enable you to keep a hold on narrative points of view or time frames in your story. Just about all of Alice Munro’s stories involving flashbacks within flashbacks could be drawn as Chinese boxes.
Another good thing to do is to lay out your pages on the floor. It’s like looking down on the thing from a helicopter. Take a look at the lie of your land; the whole artificial landscape. Sometimes it’s good to go to work with scissors and Sellotape, which is always more satisfying than the rather bloodless cutting and pasting commands on a word processor. Let your hands get dirty with paper and ink.
All of these practical tasks are another way of reading yourself, in immersing yourself in your work, as seeing each day’s work as another negotiable step on the way to a much bigger picture.
Getting into a complicated piece of writing is just like walking into a maze. You don’t know what’s waiting in the middle, you’ve no idea where the exit is and you are not quite sure which way you came in . . . You need some practical means of getting through it. Theseus had a handy ball of wool to twine out behind him, Virginia Woolf had a writer’s diary in which she kept a commentary on her progress from day’s work to day’s work.
You could draw a map or diagram (no two texts’ maps would ever look exactly the same), or you could just rely on the most obvious and essential method: reading back to yourself a certain amount of what you’ve already written.
You have to clear your mind somewhat to do this. You must regard the writer as someone who isn’t you. Let them seduce you and surprise you. You are looking for the subtexts that you weren’t actively aware of at the time, or that you’ve forgotten. You are looking for the gaps you left, the potential interesting tangents, the ‘roads not taken’. You’ll find elements you want to tease out and develop later. Their intrigue fills you with the kind of hunger and energy so necessary for you to continue writing . . .
Try this out as an exercise. Draw a map of your story and how you want it to develop. It’s up to you, the form you create for your diagram. You could use different colours for your different characters, to show how they meet up, entangle and move apart again. Or you could show them as a Venn diagram, with overlapping circles to show who knows who, who influences who in the story. You might, as fantasy writers often do, draw an actual map of the imaginary landscape your people inhabit.
When we’re writing words on pages we sometimes forget about drawing pictures. We keep the plan of something in our head. It helps sometimes to deprive yourself of words and draw the shape of your story or play or poem on a large sheet of paper. You can often surprise yourself this way. The diagram might not mean anything to anyone else, but other people don’t have to see it. It will mean something to you.
Try mapping out what you want your text to be. Draw arrows between characters’ names or images. Try showing yourself, at a visual level, how one thing links to another.
There must be a piece of work you’d like to finish and can’t quite work out how. The first stanza of a poem, the first couple of pages of a story. Hide it away somewhere and put it out of your mind, then come back to it two weeks later. Leave a note to yourself to do this (and remember where you’ve hidden it!). See what it looks like now.
Sometimes these beginnings of things are only waiting for one more element in order to progress. This may be something you have learned or observed in the intervening time. When you come back as a reader to this unfinished thing, the right element might just slip into place and then you can go on.
Keep a file for these beginnings of things that you can put away and come back to. Some of them will never be of use. Others might well just contain the germ of something that you want to pick up again and develop.
You could do this now. Look back to something, some idea from earlier in your notebooks that didn’t go anywhere at the time. You might have forgotten what you wrote back then or what was in your mind. You will read this lost piece as any reader would, trying to puzzle it out: What was the writer getting at? Use it as the trigger for your imagination now, the person you are now. See what you can make it into . . .
But you must be careful not to let reading yourself become staring into the looking glass and falling in love with yourself. Think of the wicked queen in Snow White, who adored herself and flew into a rage when she was told Snow White was, in fact, fairer. That’s like the reader who reads their own pages and decides, ‘What’s the point when Nabokov was so brilliant? When Anne Sexton said it so much better than I’ve ever done?’
It’s not a looking glass you are looking into. Don’t fall in love with all your best moments and all your bad habits. Don’t rationalize all your weaknesses and mistakes (as we do with anyone we love . . .). Don’t use that mirror to envy other writers and give up in dismay.
It isn’t a mirror. It’s raw, still unfinished work of your own.
Look at it carefully and hard and learn the techniques for moving off from it into new, further writing.
In my experience, 90 per cent of the time nominally spent ‘writing’ is actually spent reading – reading yourself. You write a sentence – or, more likely, half a sentence. You pause to read what you have written. You cross out a word and substitute another. Perhaps you cross out all the words and start again. You complete the sentence and read it back to yourself. Probably you make some more adjustments to it. You begin the next sentence and go through the whole process again. When you come to the end of the paragraph you go back and read it from the beginning and make further changes, additions, deletions. You begin another paragraph, another sentence. And so on.
I am well aware that not everyone writes in such a slow and laborious manner as this. And probably most of us write more quickly, with less hesitation and revision, when we are young. As we grow old the neurones in our brains, whose interaction generates ideas, plots, images, tropes, seem to fire more sluggishly. Also, one would like to think, we grow more self-critical and perfectionist in the exercise of our craft. But whatever the tempo of composition, reading yourself is built into the process from the level of the smallest unit of sense to the largest. It is essentially what distinguishes writing from speaking. In speech, you cannot delete or edit what you have uttered. You can only rephrase it, qualify it, contradict it, repudiate it, apologize for it. In both speech and writing, you discover what it is you have to say by trying out various ways of saying it (which means, of course, that the last ‘it’ is never the same as the first), but writing allows you the luxury of suppressing your false starts.
When you read yourself you should be trying to assess the effect your writing will have on your readers. The ability to do this is almost as important as the ability to invent or imagine what your writing is ‘about’. It marks the difference between the professional and the amateur writer, the publishable and the unpublishable. The trick is to read yourself as if the work is not your work but the work of another; or, to put it another way, to read yourself as if you are another reader. When we make our first attempts at writing, we are so entranced and impressed by our own creativity – our ability to describe actions, persons, places which had no existence before we evoked them in language – that we assume everybody else will be equally entranced and impressed. But mere creativity is not enough. The simulated world you create must also be interesting, interesting enough to lure a reader from the actual world he or she inhabits. And by reader I do not mean your mother or your lover or anyone else who is apt to be as readily impressed by your creativity as you are. I mean an imagined, anonymous, ideal reader: intelligent, alert, open-minded but demanding, equipped with what Hemingway called a built-in shit detector.
Reading yourself is not just a matter of assessing and polishing your verbal style, the diction and syntax of the individual sentence. It also covers deeper and larger structures, what we may call the cohesion of the text as a whole. In narrative literature (which is what I am mainly concerned with) cohesion is determined by the intertwined codes of causality, temporality, psychology, morality, etc., which constitute a story and affect the reader’s response to it. Although in literature all this information is communicated through language, it is not inseparable from specific verbal formulations. Narrative is itself a kind of language, more universal than natural languages (demonstrated by the fact that literary stories can be translated into different media which are only partly verbal or not verbal at all, e.g. film, opera, mime). In reading and rereading yourself, therefore, you are not only assessing the expressive function of every word group and sentence, but also monitoring the contribution of each of these tiny units of sense to the development of larger narrative strategies such as enigma, suspense, dramatic irony and so on.
Reading yourself is not just reactive, but also proactive. It is not merely a way of reviewing and improving what you have written, but also a way of generating what is yet to be written. Each sentence is a springboard from which to launch your next. When you are stuck, uncertain how to continue, it can help to take a longer ‘run-up’ – to go back to the start of the paragraph, or chapter, or even the entire work. Reading yourself is part of the ritual of writing. Such ritual of course varies from one writer to another; but probably most novelists begin the day’s work by rereading what they wrote the day before (and, inevitably, tinkering with that). Some will go back further in the work-in-progress. This kind of reading is an equivalent to the athlete’s ‘warming up’. Its function is partly to induce in yourself the state you aim to produce in your reader’s consciousness; that is, to make your imagined world, for the duration of the reading experience, displace the real world he inhabits, with all its practical demands and contingencies. It also serves the purpose of attuning yourself to the ‘voice’ you have adopted or created for the work, which may be that of a characterized ‘I’ narrator or may be the voice of the ‘implied author’, but in either case differs from your own ordinary, everyday, instrumental voice.
Sometimes you may have to put aside a work-in-progress for some considerable period of time – weeks or months – in order to do something else more urgently pressing. Or you may choose to put it aside for reasons that have to do with the work itself. Having to suspend work in this way can be frustrating or discouraging, but it also affords a unique opportunity. When you read what you have just written in the ongoing process of composition, you cannot actually experience your own discourse as your first-time reader will experience it, because you know what is coming in the next sentence or paragraph. But when you reread a piece of work after a long interval, it is possible to surprise yourself with things you had forgotten you wrote, and thus to get some inkling of how the work is going to affect a reader to whom it will reveal itself in a continuous movement from the known to the unknown. This is perhaps the closest a writer comes to ‘enjoying’ his or her own work in the way a reader enjoys it; or, conversely, to recognizing that it is deeply and perhaps irredeemably flawed.
That kind of reading oneself was very well described by Kingsley Amis in The Old Devils (1986). Alun Weaver is a professional media Welshman, who in late middle age returns to his native south Wales. In Chapter Seven he arrives at a borrowed seaside cottage, with his wife, a great deal of food and drink, and forty-six pages of a novel he began some months earlier and hasn’t looked at since.
As they stood, or with some minor surgery, they were supposed to be, he had striven to make them, his devout hope was that they were, the opening section of the only serious piece of prose he had written since his schooldays.
Note how the hesitant beginning of this sentence mimics in its deviant syntax the process of revision and emendation that writing normally suppresses, and thus conveys to us the character’s uneasiness about the quality of his work and his tension at the prospect of rereading it. Alun is adept at deceiving others, but he is well aware that there is no point in trying to deceive himself about the viability of his projected novel. ‘A great deal . . . hung on whatever he would make of those forty-six [pages] in two or three hours’ time.’ Amis extracts a good deal of humour from Alun’s nervous preparations for the reading he both desires and dreads, but most writers will find the comedy cuts close to the bone.
Almost eagerly he picked up the envelope. Before he had got as far as pulling out the contents his demeanour changed to a frenzied casualness. Head on one side, eyebrows raised and eyes almost shut, mouth turned down at the corners, he condescendingly turned back the flap, exposed the top half of the first sheet and allowed himself to let his glance wander over the typewritten lines . . . he slumped and stared out at the bay and tried to reason with himself.
Of course the first couple of sentences had reminded him of the opening passages of dozens of stories and novels by Welshmen, especially those written in the first half of the century. That was the whole point, to stress continuity, to set one’s face against anything that could be called modernism . . . he laid the typescript down on the table just like that and began at the beginning.
After five minutes or so he began to relax his rigid bomb-disposal posture. From time to time as he went on he winced sharply and made a correction, screwed up his mouth in pain or goggled in disbelief, but several times gave a provisional nod and even laughed once or twice without mirth.
The last paragraph seems to be qualifying the negative impression made on Alun by the opening lines of his novel. It seems to be saying, or to be about to say, that as he went on reading he found some merit in it. But his body language is a giveaway. Even his nods are ‘provisional’, his laughter sparse and ‘without mirth’. We are not surprised that Alun is unable to add much to his forty-six pages, and that the friend to whom he shows them for a second opinion candidly advises him to abandon the project.
For better or worse, Alun’s is the best way to read yourself for the purpose of self-assessment: to leave the work aside for a period of time, to try to forget what you have written before you reread it. But for obvious reasons you cannot do this with any frequency. There are other, less radical ways of ‘defamiliarizing’ your own discourse. Reading it aloud, for instance, will often reveal all kinds of flaws and imperfections – awkward repetitions, over-emphatic rhythms, unproductive ambiguities – which act as irritants and distractions at an almost subliminal level and may be overlooked in silent reading. According to Leopoldo Duran, Graham Greene always used to read his work-in-progress aloud, because ‘he attached great importance to the cadence of a sentence’. This habit no doubt accounts in part for the novelist’s famous ‘readability’.
When I started writing fiction, and for some time afterwards, I used to write out the whole novel in longhand and then type it up. The transition from manuscript to typescript was a vital part of the compositional process: it gave the work an encouraging new appearance, more like a real book, and also made it easier to reread and revise. I still find it useful to write the first draft of almost any kind of writing except screenplay adaptations in longhand, a few pages at a time, before putting them onto the computer. The strengths and weaknesses of the handwritten draft stand out more clearly when you remove the inky traces of scribbled cancellations and insertions, and the editing facilities of word-processing programs make it easy and effortless to make new corrections and additions. Even if you are wedded to composing on a keyboard, printing out the text can have something of the same defamiliarizing effect. I cannot read a page on a screen as I read a page printed on a sheet of paper, and I think I am not unusual in this respect. I print out endless versions of work-in-progress, read them, emend them by hand, make the emendations on the computer, print the text out again, read it again . . .
In his essay ‘The Function of Criticism’, T. S. Eliot wrote:
Probably . . . the larger part of the labour of an author in composing his work is critical labour; the labour of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing: this frightful toil is as much critical as creative. I maintain even that the criticism employed by a trained and skilled writer on his own work is the most vital, the highest kind of criticism; and . . . that some creative writers are superior to others solely because their critical faculty is superior.
What Eliot is describing here is essentially the same as what I have called ‘reading yourself’, and he is right to describe it as a critical activity. Certainly, one can only learn how to do it by reading the work of other writers – seriously, attentively, critically. However, it is not quite the same as ‘literary criticism’ in the institutional sense. A critic who finds fault with a novel or a poem is not expected to explain how it could have been improved, still less to offer to rewrite it. That, however, is precisely the purpose of a writer’s critical reading of his own work. He uses himself as reader as a kind of wall from which to bounce back hints and suggestions for himself as writer. The professional critic is, consciously or unconsciously, ultimately concerned to exert his mastery over the text of another, imposing his own metalanguage (rhetoric, literary history, structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis) on the language of the text – ‘covering it’, Roland Barthes observed, in his essay ‘Criticism as Language’, as completely as possible. With the exception of rhetoric (interpreted in the widest sense) the writer will find these metalanguages of little direct use to him in the task of assessing the effectiveness of his work, and they may be actual hindrances. The writer’s interest in criticism is practical and pragmatic. He is concerned only that his novel, poem or play should, as we say, ‘work’. It is for others to judge whether and why it is or is not valuable and important.
It occurs to me when reviewing fiction for newspapers that literary judgement is an act of faith; you know something to be ‘true’ but can’t prove it absolutely. Literary criticism is necessarily a subjective search for truth in text (and I don’t mean realism), based on many years of reading and writing. When it comes to making judgements in students’ fiction the criteria are different, but related to the above.
In recent years I have been teaching at Warwick University at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The way students are selected for the BA in creative writing is by manuscript and personal statement – ratified at interview. The manuscript has to show some aptitude for fictional language, instead of what is most common among eighteen-year-olds – an arduous slog to the sting-in-the-tail ending, the ending being the only justification of the story existing. Yet only exceptional eighteen-year-olds know how to write in a mature style and they are often protégés. With the majority of applications you have to work on a hunch, making a predication for the future based on what exists in a manuscript.
In the UCAS personal statement a student who can demonstrate an interest in contemporary authors is important, and not just their A-level set texts. Good writing is also about good reading. So at the interview you are looking for an edge, an openness, even a little eccentricity. Does the applicant have a life? Not the kind of life suggested by two years as school prefect, gymkhanas, charity work, sword fencing, but evidence of a struggle. Better still, a struggle overcome. Writers talking about books make a different sound to academics talking about books. The way they talk about modern literature is a good litmus test of how they will perform in a workshop. The creative writing workshop, particularly at undergraduate level, is principally another way of teaching literature, designed to get students looking at literature from the inside. To that end I often set imitation exercises: read for style, imitate; read for character, imitate; read for dialogue, imitate. How do you show the interior life of a character? How is landscape and setting employed to reveal character? How do you build a non-autobiographical character? Students are encouraged to write about what they don’t know.
At a postgraduate level the manuscript is the single most important criterion to look out for. You do not set so many exercises but edit students’ manuscripts instead. The MA workshop has taken quite a lot of flak from people in the industry, principally publishers who claim that writers are born, not taught. While there is some truth in that, creative writing courses grow increasingly more popular. In my view the writers’ workshop has grown in inverse proportion to a decline in editing skills among publishers and agents. Would-be writers now regard a creative writing course as a prerequisite step to getting published. The workshop is where the inexperienced writer can get into shape by honing his or her writing through close editing by a writer-teacher, who nurtures an atmosphere of experiment – and failure. Failure in writing is just another term for the creative process. The aim is to understand through practice the mechanisms of fiction. At the same time you enable students to develop a sibling critical language, so they may understand that these mechanisms are inventions too, paradigms which constantly change.
Standards at both undergraduate and graduate levels can generally be reduced to a feel for language. Fiction is about language and students should be discouraged from abusing sentences as a means to an end. Sentences are the brush strokes in the canvas. Sentences are what makes up a voice. I encourage students to practise writing through the voice of a character. Authorial voice is something else and much more difficult to teach, maybe impossible. Authorial voice is the holy grail of fiction.
As a rule students do improve their performance as the year progresses, the best improvements shown by those who have attended all the workshops, attempted all the assignments. At the year’s end I have to give grades and it is my experience that first, second and third markers reach a consensus. These markers are all writers themselves, which points to an inalienable truth that only writers can teach writing. Because writers live inside the novel, the short story, the poem. Even writers of different preoccupations and genres tend to agree when putting a value on a student’s work. At Warwick a third marker casts the deciding grade in the event of a dispute, but on the whole there is not a lot of discrepancy between markers’ decisions.
On this subject of assessment, writer-teachers should try to make judgements that are free from taste. It is the nature of immature students to make strident attempts to be different. Their preoccupations are often limited by youth. You often have to try to assess their work without necessarily liking it. As a guiding principle I regard fiction as operating in terms of its own procedures, rather than in terms of the procedures of, say, history or academia (and since universities are often our hosts this sometimes creates ructions). Another dilemma that seems to occur frequently is whether a less able student who imitates very well should earn a better grade than a gifted student who tries something original and fails. Can you mark up for promise? Is it fair to encourage with a high grade a foreshadowing of greater things to come? In the end, each case has to be taken on its own merits. But what makes a first-class degree or a distinction at MA is precisely some evidence of invention – about character, language, form. At the same time a sense of structure is necessary, even in the most experimental of work. Students are often inclined to remove traditional foundations from literature without replacement architecture and their enterprise falls down. Fraud is a close cousin to invention and should not be mistaken for brilliance. Some sign of a controlling hand should be apparent in the work.
There is no such thing as the perfect work of art, as there is no such thing as the perfect student or the perfect teacher. Nonetheless we strive for perfection knowing that it cannot be achieved.
Some writers claim never to read while they are writing. As if reading will infect their style and make them write too much like the writers they are reading. Anxiety of influence is one of the problems most writers wrestle with from time to time. Chances are you will have a bookshelf full of heroines and heroes, of writers you admire and want to emulate. At one time or another we all might try to do a Martin Amis story or a Bret Easton Ellis story or an Angela Carter story. This is not a bad thing. This is part of the process of finding your fictional voice.
Reading widely and working through the things you like about your heroines or heroes will help you to assess where you are different from other writers. Where your fictional voice is yours and where it is copied or stolen from another writer.
The best way to learn how to write is to read. But you need to read widely, beyond your usual frame of reference, in order for this to be a truly effective exercise. If you spend hours deconstructing Angela Carter or Martin Amis, and read very little else, it will cramp your style. You will find your head full of the syntax and rhythms of their writing, which will rob you of your voice because your head will be cluttered with theirs.
Now you have been writing for a while, step back from your work and do some concentrated reading. Stop reading your influences, just for a while at least, and read books you wouldn’t usually read. Go through your bookshelf and pile up all the books you’ve bought and have never got round to reading and read them. Learn to read as a writer, looking for the consistency of voice, the way the writer makes characters vivid on the page, their metaphors and turns of phrase, the way they reveal information and so on.
Write a few pastiches. Deliberately copy someone else’s style, just for the duration of a paragraph or a page or a story to try to figure out how it’s done. Do these pastiches quickly, without rewriting, just to get you limbered up. Develop an ear for the patterns and rhythms of other writers’ voices. Identifying the voices of others will help you to distinguish your own.
Literature degrees can often ruin reading for a writer. I know that my English course didn’t leave me as hungry or enthusiastic for books as I had been when I started. The minute deconstructions required by literature essays can render a text dry and lifeless. It’s a bit like putting a book on the dissecting table, opening it up, and draining out all the blood. It’s a very easy way to kill the thing you love.
I had to learn how to read again, I had to learn to read as a writer rather than as a student of literature. I wasn’t going to the text with an ideology or a theory, rather I was reading because, basically, I have always liked being told stories. I had to find my credulity again, allow a book to seduce me. I had to recover for myself the pleasure of the text.
The problem with overtly self-conscious writing, writing that is too much steeped in notions of ‘literature’, is that it puts a limit on subject matter. Always looking over your shoulder to the texts that have gone before and placing yourself within that context will stop you from being original, playful, true to your own voice. Because canonical notions of writing are linear, the writer is always at the sharp end of the process. The ‘canon’ compels the writer to be new and original and to be aware of all that’s gone before, and this can be not only frustrating but potentially damaging to the budding writer’s prospects of success.
I teach many students who, excited by theories of writing, try to emulate ‘the greats’ and tackle grandiloquent themes and subjects. They usually end up frustrated by their own inadequacies rather than freed up to write about whatever tickles their fancy. And, worst of all, their work is often pretentious and undisciplined. Postmodernism is a poor excuse for bad practice. Flashy tricks and structural play are all very well, but does it make sense? Is it coherent? Is it telling us anything new? There is nothing worse than solipsistic writing. It smacks of egotism, arrogance towards the reader, and it dresses up its lack of insight in the clothes of modernity, excusing itself from censure because it is experimental. Sometimes it seems there is a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of ‘originality’ implicit in such writing, as if originality only exists when the writing is fracturing ideas of structure or character. I try to steer students away from these rocks before they even get in the boat. Better to encourage them to create convincing characters, to develop their love of, and feel for, language, so that they become supple and articulate writers. The originality they are looking for will come of its own accord through practice. Forcing it will simply create forced writing.