Of thieves and soloists – a response to Lev Grossman
JA
November 17
Over at his blog, Lev Grossman has written a fantastic post on writing under the influence – of other authors that is, not the gin.
As far as I can tell there are two kinds of fiction writers: those who read no fiction while they write, and those who constantly read fiction while they write. Let’s have cute names for them. We’ll call them Soloists and Thieves.
I’m the second kind. I can’t function as a writer unless I’m reading somebody else — somebody better than me — and stripping off parts and reverse-engineering special effects and so on as I go. Maybe I need somebody to compete with, or just somebody to remind me that things that seem impossible are in fact possible (for other people).
The writing here is wonderfully sharp and funny – ‘I just think of [these books] as companions-in-arms. They fight beside you, loyally, and then when things get tough you wait till they fall asleep and then you mug them and roll them for whatever they’ve got’. I could immediately relate. And yes, in this world, I’m definitely a thief. That is, I always have to be reading while I’m writing. This can be anything – from sci-fi to literary, novels to short stories, bad, average or blindingly good – so long as there is at least some engagement with the imaginary. At the very least, this is so that I can keep a toehold on the world of fiction on non-writing days. And, at the other of end of the scale, like Grossman, it’s to remind me of what good fiction looks like. While I’m lightyears away from that kind of prose, I still need these books there to push me to claw up another rung of the ladder, instead of simply looking down at my feet. There’s a high rotation of paperbacks in a pile next to my writing desk that stand to evidence that slack sentences and easy outs won’t pay off, and that this is the kind of stuff that sticks. Sometimes though, this can backfire – as in shit-this-is-so-genius-I-might-as-well-take-up-a-career-in-data-entry-and-give-up-now, but most of the time, I find they help lift me out of writer’s block.
Apart from its humour though, another thing I like about this post is its bluntness. Writers’ ‘influences’ are common fodder, as is the maxim that if you want to be a writer, you must be a reader too, but Grossman resists the urge to sugarcoat. Of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash he says:
What I’m stealing [is] the style — his effortless no-bullshit humor and his sheer raw verbal intelligence and precision. Compared to Stephenson everybody else is using blunt instruments, and he’s got a molecular scalpel. Or maybe he’s got a glass knife. I can’t do what he does, but just watching him play raises my game.
He goes on to cite Franzen, C.S. Lewis and Raymond Chandler in much the same way.
Justine Larbalestier is another author who has written about influence with refreshing honesty:
Another big influence is ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’ by Lionel Shriver. A novel I have been unable to get out of my head since I first read it a few years ago. The book is both sticky and disturbing and brilliant. As unreliable narrators go, Eva Khatchadourian, is one of the most disturbing, though definitely not one of the most unreliable. Some days I think that without realising it I rewrote ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’ from the pov of Kevin and the result is ‘Liar’.
Perhaps the reason that we don’t often talk about influences in such obvious terms is again partly to do with anxieties over originality – from accusations of plagiarism at one end, to the grey area where inspiration wrestles with imitation. This might be particularly acute for new writers, who are often still struggling to tone their voices. I’ve written before about the tensions between the concept of originality and the creative process, so won’t go into depth again here, save to say that, for thieves at least, I’d like to think that reading others while writing comes as a natural part of learning to write yourself. In my reading pile at the moment there’s Collected Stories by Beverley Farmer (for the voice), two books by Julia Leigh (for the elegant geography), Christos Tsiolkas (for the uncompromising characters) and Tim Winton (for the nostalgia), and I imagine many more will come and go over time.
But anyway, enough from me – be you soloists, or be you thieves?
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Comments
17 Nov 10 at 9:15
I’m a soloist. I get all weird and jealous when I read other good writers and become overwhelmed by feelings of failure. I don’t think this is a good thing, but what do you do? The reading I do do is for research and some of that can end up being fine writing. Which is good.
...17 Nov 10 at 9:19
Thief. I read A.S. Byatt and Virginia Woolf to remind myself that I don’t have to dumb stuff down, or make nice, if I don’t want to.
...17 Nov 10 at 11:33
Literary kleptomaniac? Guilty as charged. I read to correct mood and tone.
If I read James, I get all rambly and Victorian. With Chandler, I regain brevity and the art of light quips. Sometimes reading A.J. Ayer encourages prosaic precision.
...17 Nov 10 at 12:03
Thief. Whenever I read something amazing, I want to have written that exact book. So I try, and I fail, but I learn something from the experience. (:
...17 Nov 10 at 16:01
Toni Jordan says: “I often tell aspiring writers to keep two novels on their desk as they work: one for inspiration and one for confidence. The inspiration novel should be something they love, something so staggeringly good that they think: ‘I will never manage to write anything that compares to the beauty of this novel, but I will try.’ The other should be something they hate, something so staggeringly bad that they think: ‘if this piece of rubbish has managed to be published, then so will my manuscript.’ ”
...18 Nov 10 at 12:25
Thief. I’m reminded of the narrator in Coetzee’s “Youth” who re-types passages from novels he adores, to feel what it might be like to “write” those masterpieces himself – maybe a bit like phill’s wanting to have written that exact book!
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