Performing a short piece that you have written at an open mic evening or in a pub allows you to get the very human reaction to what you intend your writing to be without needing to get the writing perfect.

That really depends on the person. I'm no stranger to public speaking, but I would hesitate a long time before attempting anything resembling 'performance'. If a criterion for writing was that I had to read it aloud to others, I probably wouldn't even make the attempt.

Alex

That really depends on the person.

Evidently!

And that opens a whole new can of worms; why do you write?

For me, as I say, I write because I want to stimulate others and because I find it easier to communicate the ideas in my head through the written word than through social interaction. (Plus, I'm egotistical enough to think my ideas are worthy of communication.)

Writing for the sake of writing is a perfectly laudable activity but, for me, seems to ignore sweeping vistas of possibility. Nothing but nothing can replace the sense of satisfaction from the moment of silence that followed my reading the last chapter of my novel aloud to a group. If I write a bloody good line of prose, I want to share that.

G

And that opens a whole new can of worms; why do you write?

Because I enjoy writing. If I was the kind of person who enjoyed performing, I'd do something else, such as play guitar or act. If I write for others, it's for them to read what I've written, not for them to hear me read it aloud.

Alex

I don't think I write to communicate with others at all. I think I do it more to communicate with myself - to try and work out what I think of things. And also it's escapism - a world I can control. I would hate to stand up and have to read in front of an audience - unless I knew that they would be receptive to my story because, for examples, they were a group of Woman's Weekly readers!

Because I enjoy writing.

Yes, so do I. The hours spent honing a piece to get the effect I want can be pure bliss. I cannot think of any other pursuit where I would willingly set out to spend a week in isolation with just me, my laptop and a few packets of instant meals for company... (I even change phones so that only my wife can contact me, and even then, only take her calls at specific times).

But who do you write for?

At some point, all the words on your page have to be enjoyed by somebody.

Surely, that's the driving force that makes so many of us keep trying to get published? Surely that's the reason you have excerpts from your work on your website?

G

I can relate to both of your reasons, Jem, especially escapism. There's something quite relaxing about the process of inventing a world and then finding out about the characters in it.

I think I do it more to communicate with myself - to try and work out what I think of things.

But you redraft, right?

And you edit to make it more readable?

For me, the need to work things out in my head about Iraq etc. was the spur to write the one I've just finished. But, having done that, I am convinced that what I've found out is worthwhile to share with others and the drive to communicate same is what made me redraft so many times and so completely.

Otherwise, I'd have stopped at the first (Terry can confirm) disastrously unreadable documentary draft that satisfied my intellectual needs without addressing potential readers' emotional ones.

G

At some point, all the words on your page have to be enjoyed by somebody.

It's the verb 'have to', in that sentence, that gives me problems. Why do they have to? If I decide that I'm not comfortable with others reading what I've written, maybe because I don't consider it good enough, then nothing 'has to' happen to it at all.

Even when my writing is for others to read, that's what it's for: reading. There's nothing in the term 'writer' that says you have to perform your material.

Alex

Well yes, I do redraft and I do write for an audience. But I'm talking about why I started writing, instead of, say, started ice skating. But like Alex I expect my stuff to be read by other people in the privacy of their own home and with me nowhere in sight.

There's nothing in the term 'writer' that says you have to perform your material.

Sorry, I didn't think I'd implied that there was!

I thought I had suggested an alternative means to expand and develop an awareness of what your audience enjoys - just one more tool in an increasingly vast toolbox.

What I did say, or rather, what I did intend to say was that there is an implicit desire to communicate something to somebody every time a creative person reorganises words for conscious effect.

G

Often, for me, there's just a desire to make a record of my imaginings. Nothing more. Sometimes those imaginings take on a life of their own and become a fully-fledged story. More often, they come to nothing because once I've got to the end of what I imagined, I can't see anywhere else for it to go.

that satisfied my intellectual needs without addressing potential readers' emotional ones.

And equally, I've read books which were clearly satisfying the writer's emotional needs, while ignoring the readers' intellectual needs. My ideal novel is intelligent about emotions, and uses intelligence as an emotional excitement. Brainy and sexy, in other words...

I don't see how you can train your writer's ear properly unless you read as widely as possible - and yes, Peter Rabbit is a fantastic suggestion: there's a pitch-perfect writer's ear as well as a storyteller's instincts at work there.

I must say, though, I'd take issue with the idea that you should only read books like the ones you want to write. For one thing, your work will always be second-hand, if you jump it only off the latest generation of the genre, commercial or literary. That's what's wrong with so many aspiring novels that I read: they're second-hand. Instead of going back to the sources of the genre, they imitate. If you want to write fantasy, don't read Tolkein's third-generation imitators, I'd suggest, go back to Beowulf and Malory and the Icelandic sagas and Tolkein himself. If you want to write Regencies, don't read them, read Austen and Burney and Gaskell and then Heyer, who invented her genre.

When you've discovered something about yourself as a writer and what you want to write, then it can be worth having a look at the kind of thing that's selling to readers now who might like your writing - debut novels published in the last 15 years is the usual prescription. But for goodness sake don't start thinking that tick-box way at the beginning, or you'll never become a writer worth reading in any genre.

And if your writing is said to be too sparse for example, I'd suggest reading Hemingway and working out how to do sparse properly so that it's resonant, not impoverished. Ditto if your writing's said to be over-written and slow-moving: read Ackroyd or I dunno - Gormenghast? And again, learn to do it so it's rich and baroque, not indigestible.

And although I wouldn't steer you towards a how-to-write book until you've done a ton of writing under your own steam and taken it as far as you can go on your own, you could try a how-to-read book, which will polish your reading glasses and tune your ear... Perhaps Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer, or David Lodge's The Art of Fiction.

As to reading aloud in public - definitely for some not others. And it can be deceptive, quite apart from the nerves. A brilliant reader can get a great response with pretty ropey writing, a terrible reader can have a terrific piece fall flat, and both will get entirely the wrong message about whether their writing works. And I speak as one whose writing tutor said, after I'd read something aloud, "Emma, if you hadn't done all the different voices, I wouldn't have had a clue who was saying what."

Reading aloud to yourself is another matter - a vital part of your working process, I'd suggest. Which brings us back to Peter Rabbit. Good writers of books which are designed to be read aloud usually have a terrific ear, for obvious reasons...

Emma

Just one point to add: if you want to be a writer you have to learn to read both as a reader and as a writer. Simultaneously. You need to appreciate a story as a story but at the same time notice how it's put together, to become good at spotting where things work and where they don't. If, for example, you post a review of a book or film on a general forum, you can tell by people's responses to it whether they're readers only or writers too. Readers-only will not want to 'spoil' their enjoyment by noticing the writing faults, and will accuse you of being nit-picky if you do. They'll also do something a writer should never do, which is to assume what the writer meant even though the text shows no sign of it. This is perfectly acceptable for a reader, since his investment in the story is purely to get enjoyment from it. But a writer, like any craftsman, has to be more concerned with the plausibility of the work in proper writers' terms.

But for goodness sake don't start thinking that tick-box way at the beginning, or you'll never become a writer worth reading in any genre.

I absolutely agree with this.


Terry

if you want to be a writer you have to learn to read both as a reader and as a writer. Simultaneously.

This is very true, although Beryl Bainbridge said that she always reckoned that her readers read as she reads all books: once, fast, to hoover up the story and characters - what's sometimes called immersive reading - and a second time slowly, if the book's compelling enough, to savour everything else - prose, ideas, complexities, implications... It might help that she never wrote a book longer than 78,000 words, I think she said.

And I know I can turn my writerly geiger counter up or down, according to what I'm reading. FWIW, I blogged about this issue here:

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2007/12/leaving-eden.html

if you post a review of a book or film on a general forum, you can tell by people's responses to it whether they're readers only or writers too.

I left a reading group which was full of friends purely because as I developed into a writer, my responses to books became so different from theirs. Not that theirs were unsophisticated at all - they were dripping with the English degrees I don't have, for a start. But I was always thinking in terms of how the writer was going about it, what they were trying to do, whether they'd succeeded, what they might have done instead... and the rest of them were reading as readers. It was a shame, in a way, because the group had got me reading things I'd never have tried on my own. But it just didn't work.

The converse is also true, of course. One of the things you have to learn to do as a writer is to read your work as others do, including non-writers.

Emma

<Added>

On the point of most writers having been mad, obsessive readers as children, I think it's usually true but not always: certainly doesn't mean you're doomed as a potential writer, if you're prepared to make up the lost ground as you clearly are.

Andrea Levy didn't read anything more than what school prescribed till she was in her twenties, she said...

I must say, though, I'd take issue with the idea that you should only read books like the ones you want to write.

Not least because you won't know until you've read them...

I think someone somewhere wrote that reading things you hate can be instructive if you take the time to work out what it is about them that riles you. Though, personally, although I used to make it my duty to read anything I started through to the end, I have begun to stop if the editing is awful... And maybe that's the benefit of reading widely, so as to make that judgement.