sarah eve kelly

The month of October was lost. I didn’t write a word. (I took notes, arranged footnotes, read, made bullet points - but all for school.) I read a novel so toe-stretchingly good that I was paralysed under the squatting weight of my own mediocrity for an entire month.

What do you do with that? I never thought confidence was something you really had to have to write, because I never felt like I had a lot, and yet I was writing. It wasn’t just my confidence that was decimated, though: it was the notion that I could bring a new narrative to the canon. If I couldn’t be exactly as good as this author - or better - there wasn’t any point. So every day I opened my document, read a few paragraphs out loud, bit my lip, dusted behind the bookcases, emitted a long, jolting sigh, and closed it again.

Then, on Hallowe’en, I had an idea. I read a different book. Here was an author I admired just as much, and who writes with an entirely different voice. That these two voices could sit at either end of a spectrum, and be just as worthy as one another, convinced me to go back to my own pages.

I’m always leery of reading anything I know will be very good while I’m writing myself (which is just about always). I know I’m going to want that voice, want exactly that kind of detail, want to make my characters speak in exactly that way. So when Stephen King tells me that the first rule of writing is to write a lot and read a lot, I get confused: if other writers mess this much with my mojo, why should I let them in?

This paralysis was worse than any other paralysis. If I wanted to keep writing, I had to look for solutions. And my solution was this: if you’re writing, you shouldn’t shut your door on other voices; you should open it wider. Get a whole cacophony of voices in your head, not just one. Because all writers are thieves (I stole that saying), they should rob as many shops as possible. You’re never going to sound like Nick Hornby. You’re never going to sound like A.S. Byatt. You have to get over wanting to. The world already has those folks; it doesn’t have you yet.

Besides, I can’t imagine there’s a single writer I admire who hasn’t been through this - hasn’t wanted to sound like someone else. It’s usually why writers get into writing in the first place. The voice you so admire didn’t emerge fully formed from Zeus’s head: it is, like yours, a cacophony of other voices in other rooms, mixed in a specific but largely accidental way to create an individual. That’s you, too, and that’s me.

People who read my site are probably sick of hearing about Hilary Mantel, but she was the one who paralysed me. The one who got me moving again was John Irving. There couldn’t be two more different voices on the western English spectrum. John Irving is, as far as I’m concerned, one of the best writers alive. He is a dyslexic wrestler who writes longhand and has probably made me cry more times than any one person I know personally. He is a genius. Hilary Mantel is also a genius. These are wonderful influences, but I can’t read them one at a time or my own writing will collapse. I have to read them both, and I shouldn’t only be reading those two. I should be reading Sarah Waters. I should be reading Michel Faber. I should be reading Stephen King. I should be reading Michael Palin’s Python Diaries. I should be reading all of it. To do otherwise would be to try to bake a cake using only flour, or only flour and eggs: both important - can’t bake a cake without them! - but whither sugar; whither vanilla extract? The cake is your voice, and it needs all the ingredients.

That might be the worst metaphor I’ve ever made. I totally didn’t steal it. That’s all mine.

Conclusion: it wasn’t Hilary Mantel who paralysed me in October. It was the fact that after I finished her novel, I was too terrified to read anything else. I was trying (sigh) to bake a cake out of thin air. You can’t stop reading, because if you do, you’ll stop writing. And if for whatever reason you’re cocky enough to write without reading, what you write probably isn’t worth being read.

So read outside your writing. Read outside your genre. Read outside your language, if you can. Every single book you read - every chapter - will inform and evolve your own voice. Don’t be afraid: these books aren’t making you irrelevant; they’re making you better.

Or maybe I’m the only person who needed to be told that?

Till next time, &c &c.

Related posts:

1. moving, and the best historical fiction
2. writing by the rules
3. drawing a line for historical fiction
4. so who’re your influences?