On Readings
Friday, June 12, 2009 at 01:13AM 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...
Reader Comments (7)
"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...
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.
Sorry, I meant you're welcome...
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.