Reading like a reader

I took up writing again exactly six years ago. There had been a spate in my twenties when I wrote like a man possessed and brief relapses in my early thirties when I pushed out a poem or forced myself to clock in for the dawn shift advocated by the likes of Dorothea Brande. I still have megabytes of folders called “early morning writing” to which I will probably never return.

It was six years ago that I finally fulfilled my life ambition by racing through the first draft of a novel. I know the date because it coincides precisely with meeting Jessica Baker, and we will have been together for exactly six years this Sunday. Pause. Somehow meeting that person rekindled my propensity to write – when I found her I found my pen.

The rest is a story of hard graft and learning. I signed up for every writing course and studied every manual. And in all that labour, I lost my faculty to read. For the last few years reading has been a matter of analysis rather than immersion. When I was a boy, I hid under the blankets with Robert Arthur’s, The Three Investigators detective stories. I had so little interest in what the author was doing that I believed they were actually written by Alfred Hitchcock, who appears in the stories. I swallowed Enid Blyton too, with not a critical thought in my head, just wonderment and, to be honest, envy for the ginger beer fuelled lives of those carefree country children. How I longed to go to a public school. In my teens I slid into Gavin Lyall, by now longing to be a secret agent. Even when I graduated to Beckett and Joyce and set out, in my twenties, on a frantic and fanciful attempt to surmount the entire black wall of Penguin Classics, I was still reading with an innocent eye.

The love of books evaporated when I became a serious writer. As soon as I started learning our craft I couldn’t stop looking backstage. How could I keep my eye on the heroine descending gracefully into her lover’s outstretched arms without peering round to see the stagehands manipulating a pulley mechanism in the wings? One of my favourite writing books is Reading Like a Writer by the fittingly named Francine Prose. She deliberately leads you to a prospect from which you can enhance your writing and destroy your enjoyment of stories. It has taken many books before I can let myself go again, and even now the scalpel is never far from my hand, to dissect the author’s technique. This reminds me of the character in Heller’s Good as Gold, who knew everything about art except what he liked.

Last week I took myself off to a book club for the first time. Down at The Drayton Court I bumped into people who read but don’t write – at least I’m guessing – we had no time for a full exchange of CVs. What I encountered was the strange and dimly recalled appreciation of a novel as though it were true. Real readers, unlike the freaks around here, engage with fictional characters as people and debate their behaviour as if they were actually guilty of murder or betrayal. They don’t notice changes of tense, let alone consider why. Slips of POV are invisible to real readers whereas they jerk my head away from the page as violently as the deliberate breakings of frame in Good as Gold, “the thought arose that he was spending an awful lot of time in this book eating and talking”.

When everyone at The Drayton was discussing whether the author thought her character was to blame for what happens in the book, or was on the MC’s side, I couldn’t understand the question. What the author wanted was to create enough ambiguity to keep people reading, and to stoke a rousing debate in the pub afterwards. The result was, without doubt, a character worth talking about.

The book we discussed is an epistolatory novel. To me, after about two letters from the protagonist to her estranged husband, with no whisper of a response from him, and no explanation why the letters were chock-full of facts he would already know, it was glaringly obvious that he was dead, or at least unavailable in some way that would be revealed later. The only other explanation was that it was a crap book and I wasn’t ready to entertain that. I don’t even consider it a spoiler to mention this here. What shocked me was that virtually none of the real readers clocked that. It showed me how literary devices don’t have to be as subtle as I first thought. Not because readers are stupid, they aren’t, but because they come to the work from a different perspective. They have different needs when they sit down to read.

Now back to the reading, not just to reawaken that first love, but to understand what an audience might appreciate – I’m going to learn to read like a reader.