On Learning To Read

• A discussion about whether Hemingway actually wrote his famous six-word story.
• For more on Roland Barthes’ concept of the writerly and readerly text, see his essay, From Work to Text, in the collection ‘Image, Music, Text’.
• Lydia Davis, ‘Collected Stories’, Hamish Hamilton.
• Donald Barthelme, ‘Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby’, taken from the collection ‘Forty Stories’, Penguin Classics.
• Richard Brautigan, ‘The Scarlatti Tilt’, taken from ‘Revenge of the Lawn’, Rebel Inc.
• Donald Barthelme, ‘The School’, taken from the collection ‘Sixty Stories’, Penguin Classics.
• George Saunders, ‘The Perfect Gerbil’, taken from his essay collection ‘The Brain-dead Megaphone’, Bloomsbury.
• Information on the First Story organisation.

On a number of occasions recently, I’ve been asked to stand on a stage and read my work to an audience. One of the rewards (and difficulties) of doing this is that it confronts you with the tangles and slacknesses in your prose; it’s easy to sense, by the dips in an audience’s attentiveness, where you’ve slipped up.

A common piece of advice for writers is to read an early draft aloud. This way, it’s said, the rhythm of the prose - or the lack of rhythm - will be made clear. It’s sound advice. It’s something I’ve often done myself. But I’m starting to wonder whether there might be a risk involved; whether the spoken rhythm might not be a little different from the internally voiced rhythm, and different enough to warrant an adjusted attention. The reader’s eye, as it moves across the page, is capable of taking in the words on either side of the one being read, and is also capable of flicking back to check up on or reiterate an earlier word, without breaking the flow or the pace of the reading, in such a way that a structurally complex sentence such as this one can succeed on the page or the screen in a way that it wouldn’t when heard. A listener to the preceding sentence would have lost the thread somewhere around the second clause. (Of course, a good reader of the same sentence would have thrown up their hands in horror. But I was using form to make a point, okay?) By way of example, I suspect that even the finest Alice Munro story would need editing before it could succeed on radio. Not because there is a word wasted or out of place, but simply because the quality of attention is different.

Once I’ve read the same piece to an audience a dozen times, it’s usually ended up edited to about half the original length, as I’ve either heard those dips in an audience’s attention or felt the words stumble over each other as they come out of my mouth. Many of those edits have improved the written piece (and it would be great to be able to tour an unpublished manuscript, in order to work those edits into the published version), but many of them are simply there to create an alternative, oral version of the piece. Most of the disciplines of oral performance - rhythm, clarity, concision - serve to strengthen the prose on the page. But written prose has other possibilities - patience, complexity, languidity - which shouldn’t be ignored simply on the basis that they would lose you points at the poetry slam.

(A side-note: the public reading has become an established part of the professional role of ‘writer’, and is something which not all writers or readers are comfortable with. The relationship between speaker and audience member is very different from the one between writer and reader; and the challenge of making this relationship work is, for me, an enjoyable one. As such, I’m interested in the resistance of many writers and event organisers to engaging with the notion of ‘performance’, and the lack of a critical context for public readings, and so I’ll be returning to this issue in a later post.)

Apparently, the last typewriter manufacturer recently closed down. So no more new typewriters. Luckily, if you’re interested in getting hold of one, the typewriters which were built throughout the 20th century were built to last: mine was made in 1945 and works a treat. Show me your MacBook Air in 2075 and let’s compare notes. 

Here’s what I know about buying and using typewriters:

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A lot of the time, when I write, I use a manual typewriter. There are a number of reasons for this. I enjoy the definitive physicality of it, the way in which it forces you into a writing procedure which goes: think - decide - type - move on. By contrast, when writing on-screen, the delete key is always within reach, and I find that this generates a kind of ephemeral indecision. While I’m working, I like to see my revisions on the page - all those strike-throughs and scribbles and arrows and notes - with the original still showing through. And I like the way that each time those revisions force me to retype a page, the physicality of the act naturally pushes me to abbreviate and compress the prose. But most of all, I like the way that my typewriters have absolutely no connectivity to the internet.

(There’s no need to expand on that. You know you get distracted by the internet when you’re using a laptop. And why wouldn’t you? But it doesn’t help.)

I’m not wedded to the typewriter, and I’ve no wish to romanticise it. What people say about the smell of the ink and the clattering sound of the keys hitting the page and the satisfaction which comes from each swipe of the carriage return is all true; but it’s not relevant. It’s not important. If I’m in a hurry, I use a laptop. If I’m away from my office, I use paper and pen. If I fancy a change, I’ll use either. But when I want to concentrate, and to choose my words slowly and carefully, I like to use a typewriter.

If you scroll down to an earlier post, you’ll find me talking about George Saunders talking about sentence compression; the fine art of making words carry multiple layers of meaning. (This is what people mean when they talk about sentences being ‘taut’; it’s not just that the sentence is as short as possible, but that it’s bearing a load, like a steel cable. A tight-rope is easier to walk on than a slack one.)

Here’s a great example, from a song by Tanita Tikaram:

If I was a Londoner, rich with complaint

Isn’t that wonderful? And doesn’t everyone who’s not a Londoner know exactly what that means? Look at the two jobs done by rich. The meaning, ‘having plenty of’, can be read as ‘having plenty of complaints,’ or ‘having plenty of money and having complaints.’ Imagine a comma after the ‘rich’, and imagine hearing the song without knowing whether or not the comma is there: your brain would flicker between the two meanings, and hold them together. Those Londoners, with their world-class museums and art galleries, their jobs, their transport network which runs all night; and you hear them complaining about having to wait 5 minutes for a tube train! You try living in Basingstoke and see how much you like that!

Because, of course, the implied insult of ‘rich with complaint’ is counterbalanced with the implied desire or jealousy of ‘If I was a Londoner.’ The speaker wants to be that which she holds in disdain, or she doesn’t but she’s fascinated by it, or drawn by it. Immediately, from the first line of the song, the attentive listener is given an armful of meanings to juggle with as they make their way across the taut rope of the rest of the song. And all of this is achieved in the space of eight words. Now that’s sentence compression.

The rest of the song is pretty good too.

When I was fourteen, a girl in the next town to mine was murdered, her partly-clothed body found face-down in a pond in the woods. She was the same age as me, and looked a little like one of the girls in my class at school. She would be the same age as me now, if whoever strangled or suffocated or beat her hadn’t dumped her body where it wouldn’t be found for a week.

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This article was written for the Swiss newspaper NZZ, and translated into German. Here’s the original.

“At the age of twenty-two, newly graduated and without a clear plan in life, I moved to Sheffield.It wasn’t a city I knew well, and there was no particular reason to move there other than that I knew someone with a room to spare. I was also a big fan of the band Pulp, and their song Sheffield: Sex City had led me to believe that the city held a promise of sorts.

 I’d been listening to Pulp for five years by then, and was still catching up on the fifteen years they’d been making their music. More than any writer I’d come across at that point, the lyrics of Jarvis Cocker were what had made me want to tell stories (and, for a brief time, wear corduroy smoking-jackets). His songs were tales of a world I recognised; a world of cheap cigarettes and threadbare sofas, park benches, ‘crumbling concrete bus shelters’, and boys who didn’t always get the girl. There was also an overlap, for me at least, between Jarvis Cocker and Ian McEwan; I’d first heard McEwan’sLast Day of Summer read on the radio by Cocker, and, later, McEwan’s Conversation with a Cupboard Man became inextricably linked with the Pulp song Babies, wherein a boy hides in a wardrobe to listen to his friend’s sister having sex. So, from the outset, I thought of Pulp’s music in literary terms.

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