Ghosting by Jennie Erdal

Author:Jennie Erdal [Erdal, Jennie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48545-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2004-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

I have read lots of novels.

For the first of these to count as an advantage you have to believe that all writing comes from the same place. I'm not sure that I do believe that. Writing prose is not writing fiction. The most I could hope for was that the experience of writing journalism, literary pieces, book reviews, and so on would act as some sort of training ground for writing a novel.

As for reading a lot, there is, sadly, no causal connection between the fact of having read fiction and the ability to write fiction. I know this at an instinctive level, and I think perhaps I have always known it; but this did not prevent me gathering together dozens of novels and taking them to France in my suitcase. It was an eclectic heap, selected from my shelves of paperbacks at home. I did this partly in the hope of discovering how to write a novel, and partly because I thought the systematic approach might compensate for lack of inspiration. The next two days were spent dipping into books by Penelope Fitzgerald, Anne Tyler, Carol Shields, Beryl Bainbridge, Alison Lurie, Anne Fine, Jennifer Johnstone. At the end of the second day I realised that I had been reading only women writers, surely a foolish exercise if I was to learn to write like a man. For the next two days, fighting off a slight feeling of frenzy, I read William Trevor, John Updike, Ian McEwan, Tim Parks, John Banville.

Spending days on end re-reading my favourite authors would normally be my idea of supreme happiness. But if you approach it as a technical exercise, it can remove most of the pleasure. I selected chapters at random, sometimes reading them several times, unpicking the prose, analysing the method, looking for clues as to how something was done—the way in which suspense, or perhaps interior monologue, was created, how one perspective suddenly turned into another without the seams showing. Gradually I became aware of different techniques and stylistic devices. When you are reading for pleasure and interest (the best way), you are aware of the good quality of the writing without necessarily noticing how it is being achieved. It's enough that it is there, and you are grateful for it. If the writer is skilled, the nuts and bolts don't show. How is the passing of time conveyed, for example? How to get to the flashback, how to jump forward in time? Is it merely to do with verb tenses? Or is there something more ingenious at work?

What I discovered was that, when time changes are handled well, you scarcely notice them; as a reader, you are perfectly happy to move through days and weeks and years in either direction provided your author has a safe pair of hands. The devices are subtle: the judicious use of a pluperfect tense, for instance, or the foreshortening of a character's history. The same applies to point of view: the narrator—even when the story

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.