Remember the Reader

    October 18, 2929        

  Back in the 1950s,  Don and I became intrigued by Kingsley Amis after reading Lucky Jim, and we continued reading his novels for a while. Since then, I’ve read one novel by Martin Amis, his son, but I didn’t continue. However, a couple of months ago as I was skimming a Publishers Weekly “Author Profile” of Martin Amis on the occasion of publication of his latest novel, Inside Story, I was suddenly riveted by this:
             “One of the best qualities of [Inside Story] is its regard for the reader. Amis acknowledges this . . . ‘You have to love the reader,” he says. ‘ . . . A book is nothing without a reader. The relationship between writer and reader is very mysterious and fascinating and not terribly well explained. There is an intimacy to reading a novel because you feel you know the writer embarrassingl
              The reader! When I’m asked for advice about writing, one of the first things I’m apt to say is “Remember the reader!”
              Thinking about this, last week I went through notes I made for talks I gave, and here are some of the other things I talked about:

•  My father’s slogan was: “Apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair, and write.” That is, don’t wait for inspiration.Write every day, even if it’s only a sentence.

•   Write first; do everything else second. Don’t say, “I’ll write when I get such-and-such finished.” Make it part of your daily schedule.

 •  My trick for jump-starting the act of writing, for inducing the trance in which you enter into your imagination—sometimes called “the artistic coma”; Stephen King calls it “being in the zone”—is just to start writing. Don’t dither or fret, searching for the perfect phrasing. The physical act of writing will set off the mental, and you’ll be on your way.

 •  Keep notepads and pens/pencils everywhere, around the house, in the car, etc.

•   Before I start a novel, I sit down with accumulated scribbled notes and a legal pad and a pencil and work on a shape, an outline. This is the hardest part for me. As Trollope said, “To think of a story is much harder than writing it.” My sister, a landscape designer, has joked that she does the design after she puts in the garden. That’s what I do with an outline! Sort of. After I’ve finished the first draft of the book, I write a much better outline for the second.
               And sometimes I ended my talks with an excerpt from “Fifty Thoughts from Fifty Years,” a piece that Dan, my father, wrote for his fiftieth Dartmouth reunion in 1986. He concluded it with an observation he’d made in the 1950s in the journal he kept all his life:

  “This thought emerges: Successful or not, the years devoted to the art, craft, trade, or hobby of writing may be looked upon as having been spent in a great tradition and enterprise. What did you do with your life? I tried to learn to write.”

               Thank you, dear readers.