Two writer-bloggers, Elizabeth Baines and Emma Darwin, have been having some thoughts about writing; these aren't really linked other than in the way I've put them together in the title, and for the convenience, of this post. That's the freedom of blogging.
Elizabeth is reflecting on the way, for its author - and coming back as she now is to revising her first novel for a new edition - a book is 'never, ever finished'. Emma has some suggestions about what readers might expect from the beginning of a novel. What struck me about both sets of observations is that, right as they may be for (respectively) many writers and many readers, they do depend on the personal predilections of the writer and the reader concerned.
For my own part, nothing on earth would succeed in sending me back to a book I'd written some while ago, to amend, rewrite, add and excise. Of course, Elizabeth is talking about a novel - not the kind of writing I've ever done, I'm sorry to say. But how unsettling it would be to have to think oneself back into a whole set of questions, assumptions, arguments; to correct and improve, but at the same time preserve what's there in its general shape. Too hard. I prefer to move on to something different.
Emma writes:
At the beginning of a book the reader hasn't yet bought into the characters and their predicament, and so, fundamentally, anyone starting to read a book is asking themselves at some level, 'Shall I keep reading?' They're working out who's who, what's going on, and how this book needs to be read (structure, language, plot), and that takes effort, so it had better be worth it now, and promise to be even more worth it soon.
And she goes on to suggest some considerations for writers to bear in mind for the opening of a novel. They looked to me, as a reader, to be pretty much to the point. But one thing that occurred to me, just because it can break a book as far as I'm concerned, relates to the level of early uncertainty and early complexity. Not to put too fine a point on it, I like to know where I am and almost at once. If Brenda is who we start with, there better be something about who Brenda is and/or what her situation is from which the story begins. If, as is usually the case, Brenda is a person with connections to other people in the world, then as they come along I'm keen to know who they are and why they matter to Brenda or in Brenda's current predicament. Suppose that on page one, a Tom is introduced but we're told nothing about him; and then at the top of page two we discover that someone once stole Brenda's diary, and it isn't made clear if this was Tom or some other person as yet unnamed. Two balls in the air. And then Kitty and Marmaduke make an appearance, one of them a cousin of Brenda's, but we don't know which one. In addition, allusions to a trauma early in Brenda's marriage but we aren't told of what nature; and stray bits of conversation but we don't know to what time they belong; and the impressions of someone's inner consciousness but whose? You get the picture. At this point I'm gone. There's enough uncertainty in life. I want to know what's what. To the point (when I don't) of a disabling insecurity.
This may well be a reading vice. My ever-loving - no mean reader she - will often say to me when she sees me getting restive by about page 15, 'Just read on. You'll see. It'll all fit togther eventually.' But eventually isn't good enough. Page 20; page 25 tops - then I'm gone.
