The things I can do while reading now include knitting! It’s not very good knitting – but it will get better a lot faster now I can read while doing it.
This is the current tally of things I can do while reading:
What can you do while simultaneously reading a book?
Everyone loves to give advice. There’s nothing quite like the pleasure of telling someone else how to lead their life.
I follow several different advice sites and “Ask InsertNameHere” columns, most of which have forum systems for giving your own advice. Often when I should be writing I spend my time explaining to strangers on the internet how they should act around cranky relations, annoying colleagues and other people’s children. But although I do occasionally post under the category advice for writers on my blog, I’m never quite sure that it’s the right thing to do.
One reason is that very few people ever take my advice. I can’t tell you how many times a friend or friend-of-a-friend has asked me for advice on getting published only to ignore everything I’ve suggested. (The most often ignored advice is: “Don’t write a 100,000 word novel and then submit it. Submit a 15,000 word draft and see if anyone actually *wants* more.”) Nowadays I save my professional advice for my writers group, who are tough enough to cope with the occasional scathing critique (“someone hit by three crossbow bolts would not shake it off easily”), and for the teenagers who ask questions at schools and book fairs who have done me the courtesy of showing up and asking a question.
Another reason I don’t write a lot of advice is that there’s heaps of it already out there. Last year the Guardian asked every prominent author they could find for their ten rules for writing. There are books like How NOT to Write a Novel and blogs like Write to Be Published and The Stroppy Author’s Guide to Publishing. Just google for “advice for writers” and you’ll find 96 pages of results.
With so much advice on offer you have to wonder how useful it is. Much of it comes uncontextualised: “write what you know”, “don’t write in the second person”, “don’t write about vampires” – TELL ME WHY! Sometimes it’s just plain wrong: “pay to get your text edited before submitting it”, “design your own cover”, “don’t bother submitting to professional publishers” – NO, NO, NO! A substantial portion of online advice comes from unpublished, pre-published or independent authors with experience in self-publishing and self-promotion – but little to no experience of professional publication. Go to an indie author for advice on alternative avenues of publication: eBooks, internet, self publication and small presses. But for advice on publication by an established publishing company go to a pro author – or better yet, a professional agent, one who won’t charge you a readers fee. (And there I go, giving advice.)
Advice doesn’t exist in a vacuum – consider the credentials of your potential mentor. I’ve been asked to give advice about graphic novels, travel writing and poetry: genres in which my only experience is as a consumer. (Not that I mean to discount the experience of the reader: reading widely in a genre is a fine basis for critique.) I’ve been given advice by people who don’t have a clue what they’re talking about: “you should write a book like Harry Potter” or “my life would make a fantastic story – write about me!”
Some authors don’t give advice. Philip Pullman’s response to the Guardian’s request for tips was: “My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work”. Careful readers will notice the stealth advice in that statement.
Most authors with an online presence give some sort of advice in their blogs, FAQs or other web pages. Advice posts are easy to write – you don’t get to be a pro author without picking up at least one tip or trick along the way. That means they’re an easy way to add content to your site – and marketing folk will often recommend creating a blog and posting up some advice to demonstrate you have an online existence. (Yes, I have been guilty of this when my blog was looking very empty.)
I asked some professional authors why they gave advice and the answers were enlightening:
And, perhaps the most compelling reason of all, “people ask”.
The authors I asked responded with noticable humility. One author I asked said “I always stress however that it’s based on my experiences so don’t treat what I say as gospel – the industry changes and editors all have their own opinions”. Another commented: “I give writing advice… but always present it as slightly eccentric and ‘what works for me’”. Another successful author said: “I always feel slightly ludicrous giving advice, I don’t know that much myself…”.
Advice given with the best of intent can be wrong. Celia Rees replied: “For every rule given, there’s someone who has broken it and gone on to sell millions. Even the vampire thing – sure, they are going to throw every Stephenie Meyer lookalike straight in the bin, but if someone came up with another twist, that could be a different thing. The only rule is… there are no rules.”
And I’m 40,000 words into a novel I haven’t submitted yet because I want to make sure I get it right. Rules were made for breaking.
A friend is writing a novel and had been considering using the idea of a game. I advised her against because it’s a well-established trope. While there may be some mileage left in the idea I think anyone considering fiction in this area should be aware of the work already done on this subject.
Here’s a list of the ones I immediately thought of but I bet there are more.
YA novels about games
Adult novels about games
Today’s quotation on @Quotes4Writers on Twitter is from John Birmingham, author of the wonderfully-titled He Died With a Felafel in his Hand:
“If you can’t be bothered reading, do not bother trying to write. You’ll fail.” John Birmingham (@JohnBirmingham) http://bit.ly/JoBirm
The quotation is from an interview Birmingham did with Australian book blog ‘Booktopia’ in 2010. The interviewer commented “we live in a world where this advice has to be given!?” Like the interviewer, I find it hard to understand. I was a ‘reading child’ and reading may be the greatest constant in my life. I read every day at an average rate of about 50,000 words a day. In CVs and interviews the expression “I like reading” seems woefully inadequate. I *have* to read. After the air I breathe and the felafels I eat it’s the next essential.
My friends are also readers. Many are writers but even those who don’t write, read. Book recommendations, diatribes and discussions form a major tranche of our conversation. Local friends belong to a book group. (More distant friends do too: but a different group.) And it’s reading that has made the writers want to write. In the last couple of weeks I’ve read about so many professional authors who were inspired by the late Diana Wynne Jones.
Still there are writers who don’t read. I’ve met only a few of them over the years so they obviously move in different (less book-lined) circles, but they do exist. “Oh I don’t have time to read, I’m too busy writing” is one explanation I’ve heard. Also “I don’t want to be influenced”. Weirdly, I’ve heard it from fanfiction authors, people definitely inspired to write by someone else’s work, whose multiple chapter epics “don’t leave time to read”. What’s with that?
What advantages are there really for the writer who doesn’t read? Yes, you do have more time. That’s got to be true. But will you use that time as well as the writer with a head stuffed full of stories? Not wanting to be influenced I can understand and I won’t read a book too close to the subject of one I am currently writing. But that’s about unintentional plagiarism for me. Influence in the wider sense of being inspired by someone else’s work is a good thing. Being a non-reading writer seems to me like doing your work in the bottom of a well.
Diana Wynne Jones (16 August 1934 – 26 March 2011)
Shortly before I went to Bologna, Diana Wynne Jones lost her battle with cancer. She was 77 years old.
Diana had a very strange childhood, she and her sisters were neglected by her parents. Her autobiography can be found on her authorised website and the story of her childhood is essentially that of the four girls in The Time of the Ghost. Most peculiarly, her educated literate parents didn’t provide books!
Diana wrote:
…my father was inordinately mean about money. He solved the Christmas book-giving by buying an set of Arthur Ransome books, which he kept locked in a high cupboard and dispensed one between the three of us each year. Clarance House had books, he said. True: it had been stocked mostly from auctions and, from this stock, before I was fourteen, I had read all of Conrad, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Bertrand Russell on relativity, besides a job lot of history and historic novels – and all thirty books from the public library in the guildhall. Isobel and I suffered from perpetual book starvation. We begged, saved, and cycled for miles to borrow books, but there were still never enough. When I was thirteen, I began writing narratives in old exercise books to fill this gap, and read them aloud to my sisters at night. I finished two, both of epic length and quite terrible. But in case someone is tempted to say my father me a favour, I must say this is not the case at all. I always would have been a writer. I still had this calm certainty. All these epics did for me was to prove that I could finish a story. My mother was always telling me that I was much too incompetent to finish anything. During her ugly, semi-delinquent litanies she frequently said, “When you do the Oxford exams, you’ll get a place, but you won’t do better than that. You haven’t got what it takes.”
Fortunately for Diana and for the world, she was never shaken from that calm conviction she was an author. Once she had escaped from the privations of childhood, she flourished. She married and had a family of her own and once her children were in school she set about the business of writing books.
Diana may be gone but those wonderful books remain. I remember howling with laughter over Howl’s Moving Castle at ten. (The scene where Sophie massacres Howl’s suits: “Give it here, all seven of it.”) I read Fire and Hemlock in the same year as I read Margaret Mahy’s The Changeover and those two books have influenced my writing ever since, making me a ‘magical realist’ author, inspired by both of those fine writers.
I’ve already posted about Diana’s work on my blog. She will always be one of my favourite authors. As I said earlier The Homeward Bounders and A Tale of Time City are two of my favourites. But other favourites include the Chrestomanci series (especially The Lives of Christopher Chant and Witch Week); the Howl series, particularly the first book, Hexwood, Fire and Hemlock and Archer’s Goom. There are just so many good novels, each brimming with originality, serious and humorous at once.
The title of ‘A Sudden Wild Magic’ expresses this quality of untamed imagination, which is why I’ve chosen it to illustrate this blog post. Diana will be much missed but she is also, rightly, much celebrated. Strange Horizons have posted a requiem in links to the various posts and obituaries of Diana. There’s so much to celebrate in an author who achieved so much and gave so much happiness to the world.
Diana said: Each book is an experiment, an attempt to write the ideal book, the book my children would like, the book I didn’t have as a child myself. I have still not, after twenty-odd books, written that book. That’s a feeling any writer will recognise. But it’s not the sense that a reader has when surveying shelves laden with so many fine novels.
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