Spread your Net

One of the best presents I ever received from my wife - and she would want me to credit her – was a Bibliotherapy session at The School of Life. (I see on their website they are still offering this, so click on the link to find out more. I would highly recommend it.)

The session consisted of a long, rambling chat with Simona Lyons, my bibliotherapist, at the School of Life offices in London. (Presumably the sessions are now available online, which would be just as good.) We spoke about my life and my work, but mostly we spoke about my relationship with books. Books I love, books I don’t. Childhood favourites, the influences on my choices, the kinds of stories that get me going, the reasons I read. It was an extremely pleasant and relaxing experience, which concluded with me being given my ‘instant prescription’ of a first book, soon to be followed by an e-mailed list of eight others. 

I don’t know what sort of algorithm is used in these sessions, or how exactly this list was created based on what I had shared, but every recommended book was an eye-opener, an introduction to new voices, new ways of storytelling. I had mentioned to the bibliotherapist that I spent most of my childhood in America, so I felt pretty steeped in that literature, whereas my knowledge of European writers was much less broad - hence, the inclusion of a Norwegian novel called THE ICE PALACE by Tarjei Vesaas (1963), a hauntingly poetic read which consequently sent me fishing into the wider waters of Scandinavian literature. We talked about my children, my independent, feminist mother, and the experience of growing up in America, and I think it was this that led to my first prescription - THE HOME MAKER by Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1926), a bestseller when first published, and miles ahead of its time in terms of the exploration of gender roles and parenting. This is now one of the books I most commonly recommend to friends and other writers. I mentioned my stepson’s love of graphic novels and was prescribed a wonderful adult graphic novel: FUN HOME: A FAMILY TRAGICOMIC by Alison Bechdel (2006), that has since been made into an equally wonderful musical. Having said I enjoyed a doorstep-sized book I could really dive into, I was thrown the curve ball of such a book but in the unfamiliar (to me) Western genre: THE SON by Philipp Meyer (2013). This is a book which I would never have picked up in a bookshop, based on its cover, but I loved it and at the same time it taught me a lot about widespread, panoramic story-telling. 

I could go on. 

As a fiction editor, reading is my job. Reading as widely, and in as many genres as possible. As a writer I gain hugely from this as well. I can’t tell you the number of times I have been stuck in a story, grappling with a complete loss of faith, and it is through reading I find a solution. Especially through reading writers I haven’t read before, writers from different countries and cultures and backgrounds, writers from different times, experimental writers as well as much-loved classic authors I have so far overlooked. Writers working in different genres to the ones I usually read. Writers who do things in their storytelling I haven’t thought of, because I haven’t come across it before. And by this I don’t mean only high-brow literary reads; it is as possible to learn from commercial best-sellers, particularly when it comes to structure. And to mindfully blow apart structure, you need to know how to build it first.

Sometimes it’s hard to know where to look, beyond the recommended reads published by mainstream bookshops and media sources. (Nothing wrong with these – I have a shopping list at the moment of 7 newly published novels recommended by Curtis Brown Creative.)  But one thing I have done as well in recent years is seek out independent presses, to discover new books and writers. My current favourite is Fitzcarraldo Editions, with whom I went on a shopping spree, on first discovery. Not everything on their list calls to me - they give you helpful previews of each book available to order on their website - but much does. And one of my favourite reads during lockdown came from Fitzcarraldo:  DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD, by Olga Tokarczuk (2009). Tokarczuk’s 2007 novel FLIGHTS was awarded the International Man Booker prize in 2018, and 2019 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, so I am late to the party in discovering this author, but it was seeking out an independent press that got me there. And even in the first pages of DRIVE YOUR PLOW(…), a question I’d been grappling with about naming characters was swiftly answered by this writer’s distinctive example. 

So that’s the tip for today: Cast your net wide. Seek out books you might not usually read. If you’re struggling with your story, or simply bored by your own familiar, well-worn style, go fishing in strange waters and seek new methods there.