On a thread about Point of View, in the public bit of WriteWords, I posted a link to this admirable exploration by David Jauss of the whole business of point of view and psychic distance in fiction. Jauss starts by discussing Hemingway's story "Hills Like White Elephants", which is an exemplar of what some call the Dramatic point of view, and some call Third Person Objective. The story is largely built from dialogue, and the rest is plain narrative of physical action and setting: it's dramatic in the proper sense, in other words: it contains nothing that someone in the stalls couldn't hear and see... except for one phrase, right near the end, where we're admitted briefly to the man's own viewpoint, and then another word. As Jauss puts it (my italics):

Hemingway... tells us the man "looked up the tracks but could not see the train" ... reducing the distance between us and him ever so slightly. And two sentences later... He writes that the man "looked at the people. They were all waiting reasonably for the train." Notice that word reasonably... it tells us not just what the man sees - or, in this case, fails to see - but the man's opinion about what he sees.

And that reasonably, Jauss says, is the most important word in the whole story.

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Every year, the Great British Public carry out a strange ritual. For two precious, sunny (hah!) weeks in summer, we secrete ourselves in our living-rooms in front of the box to experience, vicariously, the pleasures and pains of Wimbledon. If we’re really keen, we may even buy strawberries and cream, or wear a silly tartan hat with built-in red hair. Under extreme pressure (atmospheric, usually) we may even stoop to sing-a-long-a-Cliff.



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Earlier in the year, I was asked to review a book about an Italian Jesuit, Guiseppe Castiglione, who was a court artist in eighteenth century China. I was a bit daunted, because my recent reviewing had been restricted to short story collections and plays. However, I really liked the book, so I enjoyed reading and summarising the chapters, until I was interrupted by a hospital investigation that went wrong. It took weeks for me to recover enough to write the review. (I wasn't to know when I signed the consent form, but it wasn't a good idea to be in the middle of anything)


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I saw two films recently that appealed quite independently of any inherent merit; they reminded me that film for me is chiefly an escape into another world, enhanced (ideally) by womb-like warmth, darkness and silence except for what's happening on the screen.



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A writer friend - a short fictioneer turned novelist - cried for help on a forum:

So, I've been through the script of the novel and edited it and made masses of notes. I have reworked plot strands on paper and in my head and done lots of character development on the underwritten men in the book. But now I actually have to sit and put this work into the script and I just don't know how. I feel like I know you're supposed to eat an elephant one spoonful at a time, but there's no spoon, just one massive elephant to get through. Help. I am now procrastinating to the point that even my husband has noticed and commented on it. That takes some doing.

"Bird by bird", I found myself saying, and if you don't get the reference, it's here. Once you've decided what needs doing, as my friend has, the answer is, indeed, spoonful by spoonful. But what kind of spoon?

First, confine your worry to - say - the first page, and don't worry about the following 299. They can wait. Then recognise that the three things you're trying to do in revising a novel are change things, cut/shrink things, and develop things. So:

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Still recovering from a recent operation, I looked at the list of plays for review and picked out two classic plays that didn't involve too much travelling. I was a bit apprehensive all the same about A Midsummer Night's Dream at The Brockley Jack pub. It's a play more suited, I thought, to outdoor venues such as Regents Park Theatre. But the interpretation was superb. Thinking about it, although it's all outdoors the action takes place in a wood at night, so the slightly spooky atmosphere the players and the venue helped create was entirely appropriate. I gave it five stars.

The production made me see the point of a play that I knew well but never really liked or understood, so it deserves the accolade.

The other 'classic' at Greenwich Playhouse was one I hadn't seem before - apparently GB Shaw's play Candida is apparently rarely performed - but the Playhouse seems to specialise in classic revivals - good for me because, as with The Brockley Jack, it only takes me about fifteen minutes to get there.




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Dear Jerusha: I can't seem to read my novel from start to finish – perhaps in one sitting, perhaps over a few days – without changing things. I’m not a fan of directionless editing, but I’ve never read my book without spying at least a hundred words that need cutting – or maybe a couple of grammar catastrophes. I can’t just sit, read, relish. In fact, I think this type of editing – when all you want is to read and assess the flow – massacres the enjoyment: it’s disruptive and dispiriting, constantly illuminates the flaws, poses questions such as, ‘What else needs tightening?’ or ‘Where else have I used double dashes when commas would be better?’ Obviously, no aspiring writer should ever ignore these questions – but has anyone found a way to just let go and enjoy the ride?

I'd just swatted away a six-foot iguana, and was re-reading your question so as to start answering it, when your phrases "relish" and "enjoy the ride" made me pause for a moment. Without wanting to be a Calvinist about it, I'd suggest that relish isn't necessarily the most useful reason for a writer to re-read their work. We all love the sound of our own writing voice - except when we're hating it - and reading immersively, for pleasure, is essentially uncritical: witness how we turn our writerly geiger-counter right down when we're reading an entertaining but badly-written book. If you winced at every second-hand phrase and stereotyped character, you'd never discover who dunnit. But I'm assuming that the core of your question is about reading which is highly purposeful - part of your writing process - but which doesn't get bogged down in editing.

The whole point of reading through your novel is to try to read it as a reader does...

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Your synopsis is not the thing which will make or break your novel's future. It’s the voice, above all, and the characters and storytelling in the sample chapters, which will do that. A synopsis is for showing the big bones of your story: that the main characters' problem is urgent and compelling; that the stakes are raised steadily through the novel; that the plot-engineering of cause-and-effect works; that the end is satisfying. And that's where writing a synopsis can be salutary. Your novel may quiet and literary, or fitted to a known commercial genre, but it must still have its own, powerful narrative drive. If you can't make the synopsis show the big chain of cause and effect and what pit of disaster is yawning before the characters if they don't get what they need... then maybe those things aren't actually there. In other words, try not to resent the need to write a synopsis; instead, use the opportunity to think really hard about the big engineering of your novel.

But reducing your novel to a page is like catching a waterfall in a cup

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X-Men: First Class is here...can it get the franchise back on track? And how do you cram forty years of comics into a movie anyway?

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In the film of Michael Cunningham's The Hours, Leonard asks how Virginia work's going, and she says (as I remember) "I think I've got the first line". A reviewer was scornful: how typical of Hollywood to have one banal speech standing in for the creative complexities of writing anything, let alone Mrs Dalloway. It is notoriously difficult to make drama out of writing (hence the clichés of the scrumpled pages and the clacking typewriter), but the reviewer was revealing how little he or she knows about writing fiction. I and lots of other writers know that's exactly how it is. A first line embodies so much of your project that when you realise you have that body it's a huge step forward.

On one hand, at least with a novel, you're unlikely to know what the first line must be until you know a lot about your project. On the other hand, at least in short fiction, my moleskine is full of first lines which arrived from nowhere, while I was doing something else. Each seemed to have some resonance, some intriguingness, about it that hints at story and emotion beyond its own compass, and I'll write the story to find out what it's all about. Those two hands can both be true because most of the following will be built - implicitly, and sometimes explicitly - into any first line:

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