no service
For about six months now, I’ve been terrified of reading novels, even ones that I’ve read before. My own voice is slippery, my confidence on papier mache foundations: if I read a novel I liked, I would either transmute my own work into a laughably poor imitation of that author’s prose or shrivel into the deepest recesses of my bed and watch Comedy Central video clips for a week.
Many authors have admitted that they’ll not read any novels on their subject while they’re writing; I turn the corner on this admission and state that I will only read books that could not by any stretch of creativity, ingenuity or credulity have anything to do with either my subject or my style. (Style? I have a style?)
No matter how old I get, until this novel is complete I will still be a young writer, viz. impressionable, insecure. Here is a list of what I am allowed to read between now and when this novel is finished:
PG Wodehouse
Annie Dillard
Florence King
Arthur Conan Doyle
David Starkey
Michel Faber (tight squeeze, that)
Eric Ives
Also: almanacs, calendars, articles from the JSTOR database, and punditry on the Democratic primaries.
I list those particular authors because they don’t write anything I will ever be capable of (with the exceptions of Drs Starkey and Ives, but I read them for the facts). Wodehouse - well, anyone can read him and get by; he can’t be replaced and no one who has enough taste to read him would suffer a lapse in judgement substantial enough to attempt to write him. Annie Dillard comes closer than anyone on this list to having a style dangerously close to mine (or what I attempt, in any case), but I’m avoiding her novels and sticking to her short-take non-fiction. Florence King puts such a smile on my face, but I’m neither clever nor mean enough to ever get near her. Doyle’s great weakness - for which I am grateful - is his two-dimensional women (and don’t come back with a lot of Irene Adler claptrap about them being “strong” or, as Watson consistently puts it, “remarkable” - they’re horribly underdeveloped, the half-drawn portraits of his stories), and so in writing about several women in what I hope to be six dimensions, Sherlock Holmes is a welcome refuge.
Michel Faber is a close call. When I first read him I had one of those terrible epiphanies, followed by a paralytic stupor of jealousy, followed by diligent imitation, but no matter how hard I tried, I could never make a banister as fascinating as he does, and you have to stick to what you’re good at. Also, I don’t have twenty years to spare.
This strict diet of reading denial is making me come off as a bit of a pleb in conversation, especially amongst those friends who start off asking me what I’m reading instead of asking me how I am. And now school threatens again, and I’ll be reading books like The Making of Man-Midwifery and other wonderful books of absolutely no interest to anyone except me and a score of other weirdos, none of whom I’ve met.
I’m racing a friend with this manuscript. She’s writing a Master’s thesis and I’m finishing my story, and we’re both going to be done by the end of March, or bust. After that we can read again.
You know, this calls to mind how much I want to be exactly like John Irving. I’m going to go restrain myself now.
Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.
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