Adam Lively: Writer – Literary Mentoring and Coaching

The other day, I came across this entertaining passage, from Paul Theroux’s introduction to the Penguin edition of Paul Bowles’s celebrated novel The Sheltering Sky. Theroux reproduces an extract from his notebook, written in a café in Tangier right after meeting Bowles:

He seems to me a man who masks all feelings: he has a glittering eye but a cold gaze. He seems at once preoccupied, knowledgeable, worldly, remote, detached, vain, skeptical, eccentric, self-sufficient, indestructible, fragile, egomaniacal, frank, and hospitable to praise. He is like almost every other writer I have known in my life.

Theroux’s list of adjectives will raise a smile of recognition – many writers are indeed prickly individualists. Hollywood has traditionally gone even further, mining a rich vein of portrayals of the writer as alarmingly asocial – from Humphrey Bogart’s violent, hot-tempered scriptwriter in In a Lonely Place to Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance in The Shining (NOT a role-model for aspiring novelists!): writers, the story goes, are Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know. . .

Is it true? Are we writers really so completely friendless and detached from common humanity?

It pains me, this beautiful Spring morning, to be able to offer only one small crumb of comfort: we writers do indeed have a meaningful, lasting relationship in our lives – with our reader. Our reader is our friend, our lover, our life-partner (James Joyce famously said that his ideal reader was someone who would spend the whole of their life reading Ulysses over and over again). The bland phrase “reader-friendly” doesn’t even begin to cover it. With our reader we’ve enjoyed or endured all life’s experiences (“good times and bad”) – we’ve laughed, cried, quarrelled and made up. Sometimes we’re tender and sentimental together, sometimes playful and flirtatious. Sometimes, when things have got really rocky, we’ve been confrontational and antagonistic (try being a reader of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground). But in the end, we remain faithful.

We remain faithful because if betray our reader, we betray ourselves, we become bad writers: bad writing happens when the writer has forgotten their reader. And we all know what happens when you take your lover for granted: they put you down and start reading some other writer.

(Notice that our reader is an individual: it’s not the same as a collective readership, the latter being the concern of publishers and marketing, or of writers with their publishing/marketing hats on. As writers, whispering sentence after sentence into their ear, our intimacy is with a single imaginary reader: that’s what makes fiction-reading and -writing different from more public and spectacular forms like film and TV.)

So, dear reader and fellow writer, I offer but one piece of sage advice on this beautiful Spring morning at the beginning of April. By all means betray your husbands or wives, abandon your families, forget your friends – none of that, you can rest assured, is of any importance whatsoever.

But never EVER forget your reader.

And now that I’ve got that off my chest, I’m off to work on my new novel. I’ve got the best ever opening already:

ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY

ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY

ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY. . .