Seducing Your Reader. Want To Be A Writer? Then Make It Something You Can’t Be Without.
By Kate Gould
Writing at its best seduces. This is your aim: to take the reader into the world of your making and convince them to stay. The urge to write begins with enticement and so should the urge to read. You got into writing for all manner of reasons: love, ego, boredom, money, fame. What you need to keep you in it is passion. Writing should become a compulsion to you. Nothing less will make that world. You want to write? Then make it something you can’t be without. “Language is wine upon the lips,” said Virginia Woolf. So it should be with you.
Think back to when you first learnt to read. Sound out the vowels and consonants. Remember how those letters you laboured over looked to you on the page. It’s not just a cerebral thing, forming words. There are curves and lines that took time to learn – at first your hand was scrappy and the pencil awkward, slowly you learnt to form the letters. Most likely, the first thing you learnt to write was your own name. Then they were more than just rote-learned symbols and laborious alphabet recitations. Suddenly you had some ownership over those letters – lines and curves on a page that signified you. You built those letters up into words and you had language. To succeed as a writer, you have to love what language can create. The reader won’t stir to the efforts of a half-hearted lover. You have to take words and make of them something new. You have to take what you see, smell, hear, taste and touch and make it real. What is it that you want the reader to experience? How are you going to get them there? With words. It started as straggly scrawl – lines on a page – but once you make letters into words and words into language, it becomes something new entirely. It is a tool to communicate the depth, breadth, and height of every loathsome, sexy, joyous, mundane, peculiar human experience. And any new ones you care to invent. Get a handle on that tool and you can do anything.
The relationship between a writer and reader is one of reciprocal need: you need the gratification implicit in the reader’s desire for your words and they need your words to envelop their mind. Your writing can give them a fifteen-minute distraction on the train home or it can divert them from all that their life contains, making them question everything they ever accepted and believed. It depends on what you want to achieve. Why people read is as varied as why people write so a few moments’ distraction is as valuable as an experience from which they will emerge indefinitely (perhaps indefinably) altered. Everyone has become lost in a book at some time in their lives. It’s for the ever-surprising plot, the tangle of language from which it is difficult to extricate ourselves, or the slightly narcissistic search for self or sense of self-recognition, as though no one knows us like the writer. We read to learn, to disappear, to switch off, to hope that we will know our lovers a little better by reading their favourites. Consider why you read. What is it you want from a book? Is it to be distracted or diverted, entertained or irrevocably changed, to experience familiarity or lives so far removed from your own the characters could well exist on another planet? Take what it is you want from reading and transplant it onto your writing. Write what you want to read, whether it’s genre-bound or the book you wish was out there.
Why, how and what you write is something you’ll have to work out. What writing means to you – its place in your life – is also there to be decided. How you come to writing will determine how it comes to you. Indifferent prose will be the reward of the indifferent writer. If that is your approach, you might write a Blake Carrington but you won’t write a Heathcliff. You won’t know the intoxication of Woolf’s wine or Emily Bronte’s capitulation to the craft to which she was held darkly in thrall. “The writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master – something that at times strangely wills and works for itself,” wrote Charlotte Bronte, introducing her sister’s book. “Be the work grim or glorious, dread or divine, you have little choice left but quiescent adoption. As for you – the nominal artist – your share in it has been to work passively under dictates you neither delivered nor could question – that would not be uttered at your prayer, nor suppressed nor changed at your caprice.”
Writing need not be your oxygen. It need not be a near-death experience for you or those around you. It isn’t necessary to feel, as Virginia Woolf did, that the only thing keeping her alive was writing, rendering her suicidal at the end of every book so she was forced to start another til finally she succumbed to the waters of the river Ouse. Anaïs Nin wrote of herself, “I am truly mute without writing”. Reading romance, you can fall in love with a character without, as Mary Wollstonecraft feared all women would, abandoning all educational aspirations and settling for marriage to a winsome cad. Elizabeth Smart lost everything to her muse, George Barker, ravenous for both the man and his work. Scott Fitzgerald robbed Zelda of far more than her wealth in a bid to stop her writing, but still she wrote. I could go on: the road of great writing is littered with those who’ve suffered for their craft through poverty, broken marriages, nervous breakdowns, suicides, obsessions, violence, and perversity. That is the way creativity worked for them. But don’t ape the antics of writers you admire and think it will make you great. Find your own way to seduce. Lure the reader into your world and always remember that purpose. Writing doesn’t need affectation – it needs passion.
About the author:
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Kate Gould has worked as an editor, book critic, columnist, slush pile reader, writing competition judge, hotel critic, magazine editor, English teacher, and research assistant. She is now Chief Editorial Consultant at The Fine Line and author of The Pocketbook of Prompts: 52 Ideas for a Story and The Perfect Word: The Fine Line Writing Course. Her book on flashers, Exposing Phallacy, is to be published by Zero Books. |
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