On Readings

A.L. Kennedy has been talking about readings, over on the Guardian Books Blog. I threw in a few comments, in the comments section. I may as well copy my first one here...

"Readings improve the work, and the confidence in the work. Having to read a chunk of prose aloud, you're forced to disentangle sentences that look lovely and literary on the page, but which are in fact merely incoherent and needed another draft. (Don't worry, good weird prose survives this process, you aren't going to flatten it all out to Ladybird Book level.)

And so much of good writing is about delivering information in the right order (especially inside the sentence, at sentence level). Reading it aloud to strangers (who don't already know it as horribly, blindingly well as you do), you can see where you've screwed up and delivered the tragic/comic punchline twice, or too early, before a vital piece of information needed to make it work. Or very simply that you've had a character do something in a new room before it's entirely obvious to the reader that she's walked through the door."

More on than topic over at the Guardian...

Comments

[Nik]

Ahh... Thank you for that! One of those explanations of a thing which make it suddenly "click" into focus for me, as if I'd understood it simply and intuitively all along. And I like how you pointed out that this is important on all levels, but especially "inside the sentence". It makes me think of the kind of tension/release rules that music plays by, or pretty much anything else which is consumed in a time-based manner.

[Julian Gough]

Oh, glad you found that useful. I am a bit obsessed with that point (that prose fiction is about delivering information in the right order), because even good, published writers don't seem to know it. And they are particularly bad at sentence level. Here's a random sentence taken from William Gibson's Spook Country (I just threw it open... OK page 3, half way down...)

"She got out of bed and crossed to the window, hoping she wouldn't step on the robot."

Now, that is an absolutely typical example of what I was talking about. And writers do this all the time... As you read this sentence, she gets out of bed and crosses to the window. "She got out of bed and crossed to the window..." So, halfway through the sentence, you have finished visualising her journey: she is at the window. A totally uneventful journey. THEN he tells us that, while she was making that journey, she was hoping that she wouldn't step on the robot. "...hoping she wouldn't step on the robot." Well, why is he telling us that now? It's of purely historic interest. There is no tension or drama in the unfolding of that sentence. It is dead. This is what he should have written - exactly the same words, different order:


"She got out of bed and, hoping she wouldn't step on the robot, crossed to the window."

Now there's a moment of tension followed by a moment of release. She hopes, and you hope with her, that she won't step on the robot and oh! wonderful, she's at the window, she didn't step on it. The sentence has a dynamic. It is a suspension bridge which you safely cross with the heroine.

Even writers that are good at the big structural stuff don't seem to understand that a sentence also unfolds in time, that the beginning of even a short sentence happens earlier than the end. And that the reader can only visualise things as the information arrives, they don't have the whole thing in their head already. Which means all descriptive or action sentences have the ability to pull the reader forward, or to go dead and frustrate the reader, depending on how they are written.


Anyway, rant over...

[Nik]

It is also good that you pointed out that we are talking about prose fiction... other less narrative-driven forms of writing would probably fall off to one side or the other, say, "poetic" on the one hand or "logical" on the other.

Thinking about this has made me start to question the way I retain the information of various sentence structures. I feel like I should go read up on some linguistic theory, or cognitive psychology books on memory chunking or something.

[Mel]

Agree with Nik, you have stirred me to pay more attention to the white spaces. Thanks Julian.

[Julian Gough]

Welcome, you are.


Sorry, I meant you're welcome...

[Kev]

I'd actually go with the original robot sentence, in the context of a William Gibson novel. He's not about creating a sense of comfort in his readers, or his characters. They're meant to be permanently adrift in a sea of delocalized tensions that never get fully resolved.

But you're definitely right that it's not designed to be read aloud. Funnily enough I went to a reading of his promoting Spook Country (I think he may even have read the chapter containing that sentence), and it didn't work well at all. The work of the artist driving the story in Pattern Recognition is probably a pretty close analogue to what he's trying to achieve himself.

[Nik]

See? Master Yoda used that kind of backward language also... but I guess he wasn't trying to write a novel