SHOULD YOU READ FICTION WHILE
WRITING IT? THE ANSWER DEPENDS ON
HOW PARCHED YOUR SOIL IS.
March 1989
Long ago, the Australian writer Peter Carey was interviewed on American television. In the course of the program he explained why he avoids reading other people’s fiction while in the process of composing his own.
“Otherwise,” he explained, “I’ll read a particularly good description of a storm. And I’ll put the book down and say to myself, ‘Damn, that’s my problem—I haven’t got enough rain in my book.’ ”
The foregoing is not a verbatim quote. It’s not even a close reconstruction from memory, because I never saw the program in question. I had it recounted to me by my friend Philip Friedman, author of the about-to-be-published courtroom thriller Reasonable Doubt. I am reconstructing from memory Philip’s reconstruction, so Mr. Carey’s actual words may well have been something rather different.
No matter. They amount in any case to an excellent argument against reading while you’re writing. “Not enough rain in my book.” Says it all, doesn’t it?
Except that Philip, reporting the incident, drew quite the opposite moral from it. “I thought about what he’d said,” he told me, “and I realized that’s precisely why I do read other people’s fiction while I’m working on a novel. Because, if I don’t, there really won’t be enough rain in my book.”
We had this conversation back in September, when Philip and I were both coincidentally in residence at the same writers’ colony. He was finishing up Reasonable Doubt, while I was at work on The Cutting Edge of Death, a detective novel featuring an ex-cop named Matthew Scudder, of whom I have written on several occasions over the years. (Faithful readers of this column will perhaps recall my explaining a year or so ago that I would not be able to write any more books about Mr. Scudder. Obviously, this turned out to be every bit as premature as Mark Twain’s obituary. How all of this came about may prove instructive, and I’ll very likely write about it sooner or later. Stay tuned.)
After Philip and I had our conversation about Mr. Carey, I shrugged it off and went back to work. I did notice over the next several days that I was paying rather more attention than usual to the weather—not the weather there at the colony, which I recall as wildly variable that month, but the weather Scudder was encountering in New York. There was, that is to say, quite a good bit of rain in The Cutting Edge of Death, and I couldn’t help wondering if some of what was splashing on the page was a result of our discussion.
More to the point, I found myself thinking about the whole question of reading while you write, of bombarding the senses with another writer’s fiction while endeavoring to produce one’s own. I myself have addressed the issue in several different ways over the years, and with varying results.
Early on, it would have been inconceivable for me to have avoided reading while I wrote. During my 20s and 30s, I was always at work on one book or another. While I did not work every single day, neither did I take a great many days off—and, when I finished one book, I was hard at work upon the next within a week or so. I was not quite the drudge Trollope was—he reportedly would write the last sentence of a long novel, draw a line, heave a sigh, and jot down the first sentence of his next novel, starting work not only on the same day but, God save us, on the same page.
Not me. I would waste a few days, and I’d be profligate enough to begin the new opus on a fresh sheet of paper, but it must be said that I was not much given to long vacations. Had I eschewed reading while I wrote, it would essentially have meant not reading at all.
And that was out of the question. Reading was then at least as important to me as writing, and no more to be done without than food and water. I was always reading something, and commonly had a few books going at once. (And, in those days, I finished everything I started—as a reader and as a writer. This surely has changed. I discard a large number of books half-read nowadays. And, alas, I discard more than I’d prefer half-written. I don’t mind being free of my old reader’s compulsion to finish everything on my plate, but I sometimes wish I were a little more compulsive still about finishing what’s in my typewriter.)
As a general rule, reading in those days was something I did when I was finished with the day’s work—or, less frequently, before I started it. While I was actually physically present at the typewriter, banging out something immortal, I didn’t have somebody else’s book in my hand.
My chief reason for not doing so had precious little to do with the presence or absence of rain in my work. On a more mundane level, I learned that reading would very simply take time away from my writing. I might indeed have the need to draw my mind away from my work for a moment or two, but reading at such times was a dangerous diversion. Either I wouldn’t get drawn into the book at all, in which case it was not doing what I wanted it to, or I would be utterly absorbed by it, in which case it would be doing its work far too well. I would have wanted a five-minute respite from my own work, and before I knew it an hour would have vanished. The better the book, the greater the danger—and, if I got sufficiently engrossed in it, I could not even escape by closing it and setting it aside. Even then, I’d still have my mind caught up in its force field, and would be hard put to concentrate again upon my own book.
Sometimes, too, what I was reading would have a direct influence on what I was writing. Once, reading a Rex Stout novel while at work on something of my own, I looked up from a sentence I’d just written and realized with a start that it had more of the cadence of Archie Goodwin than of my own narrator. I don’t know that anyone else could have noticed this, and there wasn’t anything sufficiently wrong with the line to make me go back and change it, but it was there, and it got my attention.
In recent years I have increasingly tended to make writing a less frequent and more concentrated experience. Sometimes I isolate myself—in a motel room or rented apartment, or, as with my last two books, at a colony. I work rapidly, put in long hours, take no days off for the duration, and produce a large quantity of work each day. I wind up completing in a month what might take me three or four months under more ordinary conditions. I don’t get more work done overall in this fashion; having finished a book in a month, I may go three or four or six or eight months before getting to work on another. But I like working this way, and it seems to me that I’m better able to concentrate on my work and to bring all of my resources to bear on it.
Because the success of this method depends upon the intensity of my concentration, I certainly don’t bring novels to the typewriter. It’s true that I seem to require frequent breaks from my work, interruptions during which my conscious mind can yank itself away from the manuscript while, presumably, the unconscious mind goes on sorting things out, sifting alternatives and solving problems. As I reported some years ago in this space, my choice for such interruptions is solitaire, and I will commonly wear out a deck of playing cards almost as quickly as I’ll exhaust a typewriter ribbon. (That used to be true. The new cartridge ribbons, however, are ready for the garbage can after 30 or 40 pages, while I can still get a whole book out of a deck of cards.)
During my hours away from the typewriter, I don’t have anything as fixed as a rule about avoiding the reading of fiction. On the contrary, I’m perfectly willing to do anything that will pass the time agreeably between one day’s writing and the next. I have found, though, that I am rarely receptive to fiction at such times, or at least that I have trouble concentrating on a novel. (Short stories are more apt to hold my attention, since they aren’t called upon to hold it for very long.) I must have picked up six or eight novels while I was writing The Cutting Edge of Death, but I didn’t get all the way to the end of a single one of them.
It seems to me, though, that there’s a larger question here. It’s not just a matter of whether or not to read fiction while writing fiction. Beyond that, one has to decide what input of any sort is to be allowed. Anything—a movie, a television game show, a conversation with a passing stranger—can call into question the amount of rain one has in one’s book. Any new element in one’s surroundings can alter one’s own mental state—and can thus affect what winds up on the page.
Consider, if you will, the writing method of Georges Simenon, an archetypical role model for all of us who would write rapidly and in isolation. Typically, Simenon takes himself, his suitcase and his typewriter to some European capital, where he checks into an agreeable hotel, hangs the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the knob, and produces an Inspector Maigret mystery in 12 days. (Let it be said that these books are short. This is not to minimize M. Simenon’s achievement, but to keep the task from appearing even more Herculean than it already is.)
After Simenon has done his first day’s work, he goes for a walk, buys a packet of tobacco, has a cup of coffee, and otherwise amuses himself. There is nothing terribly remarkable about his course of actions, except for the fact that, on every subsequent day until the book’s completion, he follows the same unvarying routine. He walks the same route, patronizes the same tobacconist, sips coffee at the same café, and consumes the same evening meal.
His object, as I understand it, is to avoid any change that might touch off a corresponding change in his own mental environment. His goal is to remain all of a piece while he writes the book, so that the book itself will similarly be all of a piece.
I’ve found that I tend to create a routine away from the typewriter while I’m engaged in writing a book, though it’s not nearly as elaborate as Simenon’s. Often, though, I’ll have something I make a point of doing on a daily basis, some exercise regimen or some form of meditation. I’m not sure, though, that I do this for Simenon’s reason. I have the feeling that I take up such rituals for their own sake, much in the manner of a baseball player who won’t change his socks during a hitting streak, if with less fragrant results.
As far as maintaining my own mental environment in an unvarying state, I don’t really think that’s possible. And, even if it were, I’m not sure it’s desirable.
The impossibility seems clear enough. As Heraclitus told us, we can never set foot twice in the same river, because other waters are flowing. By the same token, Simenon can never truly retrace his steps from one day to the next, for he can never step twice into the same street, or drink coffee twice at the same café. Other waters are flowing. Different people are walking in the street, or sipping their own coffee at nearby tables. Even those persons and objects that remain unchanged will impinge differently upon his consciousness from one day to the next.
I don’t have to pick up someone else’s novel and read about a storm to become concerned, for good or for ill, that there’s not enough precipitation in my pages. If that’s the message my mind wants to receive, I’ll find some way to receive it. If there’s no fictional storm on hand to bring me the message, the skies will very likely open up while I’m walking to my studio some morning. Or they won’t and the very lack of rain will deliver the same message.
And sometimes, as Philip suggested, that message is precisely what I need to hear. Because there really is too much or too little rain in the book, and it’s my own conscious awareness of this lack or glut that brings some outside element into my awareness.
It was last May when I began preliminary work on The Cutting Edge of Death. I was in Arizona at the time and I was writing the book in novelette form, as a way of allowing the story to develop, (I eventually decided against publishing the novelette, but having written it that way helped me greatly when it was time to write the full-length novel.)
My plot called for the death of a character by what might or might not later turn out to be suicide, and I was having trouble with the scene. I wrestled with it for a while, then did something quite uncharacteristic. I walked over and turned on the television set. The Oprah Winfrey Show was just coming on and I sat down and watched it. The subject turned out to be autoerotic asphyxiation, and it was exactly what I needed to see at that particular moment, because autoerotic asphyxiation was precisely the plot element my story required, the very rain my book was lacking. I watched the whole program, and then I sat down and wrote the scene.
Should you read fiction while you’re writing it? I don’t know. But, whether you do or not, your mind will inevitably—and quite properly—be influenced by everything around you while you’re engaged in the organic process of composing fiction. The rain will sink in or run off, depending upon what you do or do not require of it. If you’re open to it, you’ll get what you need.