Reay Jespersen

I was reading a book this morning - Never The Bride by Paul Magrs - and at a moment in one of the short stories, just when I was getting into it, I read a paragraph that made me mentally step back and analyze what had been done in the writing in order to achieve a certain effect. And it occurred to me that on the one hand, having that happen is a compliment to the writer, but on the other hand is frustrating for me.

I’ve been writing stories on and off all my life, and have explored various different formats over the years. I’ve learned from books on honing writing skills and have attended seminars relevant to my work; studying, in short, how to be a better writer. A big part of that studying, of course, is reading.

When you read, you learn how to construct sentences, paragraphs, and stories. You learn structures, nuances, and styles. You learn what works and what doesn’t (and more importantly, why it does or doesn’t). And even if you don’t deconstruct what you read - consciously tear it apart to see how and why it works - reading gradually influences how, and the quality with which, you write.

However, as the saying goes, you can’t unlearn something. Once you’ve read up on, say, techniques to help make a scary scene more scary, it’s all too easy to find yourself reading scary scenes and mentally ticking off techniques that have been used rather than being swept away in the story itself.

It doesn’t happen to me all the time, of course. There are writers - Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, George RR Martin, Terry Pratchett, Elmore Leonard, and James Ellroy, to name a few off the top of my head - whose work is so well written and engrossing that it’s only when I put their books down between readings that I pull back from the tales they weave to consider how they managed to do what they do (invariably with envy).

Which brings me to the conundrum: is it possible for writers to at least mute their writer-ness long enough to enjoy anything at all that they read to avoid this intermitent, disruptive studying of the material, or is it only personally preferred writers and (types of) stories that we can look forward to enjoying purely as its intended entertainment?

So I’d be interested to hear: if you’re a writer, do you have this same problem with some of what you read? Which authors don’t you have this problem with? Whose work do you find yourself blissfully engrossed within, be it for particular stories or again and again? Might we be able to learn from them? Is just being a good writer enough to potentially be this distractingly engaging to other writers, or can we learn specific lessons from the masters about how to be this engaging?

What are your thoughts?

So I was attending a panel discussion on books tonight, and caught up afterwards with the guy who, as it turns out, runs HarperCollins Canada. We chatted one-on-one for about ten minutes. Very genial guy who, of course, I hope will ultimately be greenlighting some of my own work in the near future.
I get the impression my knees were shaking from more than the cold, but if he picked up on any nervousness, he certainly didn’t let on.

Overall awesome?
Yes.

While I’d seen the book around in various places, I’d been under the impression that it was an anti-huge corporation book. It turned out to be something far more interesting and deep than simply slamming another big company.

Author Tom Slee shows the reader in progressively complex ways how it is that the commonly-held view of how the marketplace works - that given options of what to buy, people will always choose what they most prefer, and that the most preferred product/company will therefore prosper while the less preferred will fade away - in fact works very differently. From what orange juice you buy to what car you buy, from where you live to what school you want your children to go to, there are many factors which are at play which skew the way reality works from the MarketThink (as Slee calls it) company line. What we choose, in short, is not indicative of what we would most like, but rather what is the best reasonable option given the choices available in view of those other factors. Hence, those who have the power and inclination to affect those other factors have the ability to alter what our choices will be, leaving us with fewer reasonable options to choose among.

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