It’s important to read outside of your comfort zone*. I know people who love themselves some Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Anything gets published with a spaceship or an elf on the front and they are somehow forced to read it. As if Terry Pratchett’s diminishing faculties are caused by a Firestarteresque ability to push people into doing what they don’t want to – like reading the same tired shit 9,000 times.
I have friends who are fucking experts on warp drives and siege catapults. Some of them even write Sci-Fi and Fantasy and the stuff they send me is every bit as good as Star Nipple or The Book of the Wrym Volume 5: Blood Sapphire’s Apprentice. And by that I mean derivative as fuck and as appealing as the pod thing that gets forked in the greenhouse in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
I try and read broadly. Although ironically in this post I’ll be referencing airport bestsellers rather than Beckett and Sartre.
I dip into Sci-Fi and Fantasy from time to time (unless it’s book anything in a cycle of something else - then life’s too fucking short. If Brautigan could craft a perfect short story in two sentences then some long-winded bastards need to tie up their loose ends within 500 pages. That should be a law), haven’t read a good horror novel in a good long while (but live in hope) and still pick up as much sparkling stuff piled high in the new releases section as I do in the dustier corners of a second hand bookstore. I order crap online on a whim and am surprised to see it appear, but also pace near the front door waiting for that one meticulously researched text that I NEED to arrive. I have e books on my phone and laptop, a reading pile by my bed, on my desk in the office and in the bathroom (note to self – remove all references to Nazi exploitation from 70’s pulp magazines before inviting friends over for the first time). There’s not a room in the house that doesn’t have a dogeared mess with a broken spine lying around with it’s dust jacket torn waiting to be put out of its misery. And my bag always has a paperback stashed inside. Sometimes three.
All of them tend to be quite different.
And the great thing is that when your head is in the right place any one of these books can fire things off in directions you weren’t expecting or be in some way connected to the thing you were hoping to be distracted from.
I had a brain freeze today. Like I was eating a Cornetto in an Edgar Wright movie. And so I collapsed on the couch with two kittens and a book entitled The Art of Charles M Schulz. Here’s what I found in the introduction by Jean Schulz:
“The ideas Sparky used are out there in the world. We all know them and that is why we relate to them. It is the particular twist Sparky put to the ideas that described his genius, and that draws us, enchanted, into his frame.”
The wiki page I’d been building and had to close half finished had been about constructing narrative to form what Hugh would call a social object. It seems Jean and Sparky were way ahead of us.
“He understood instinctively the value of the story which illustrates a human truth, and which allows his listeners to take from it what they need at the time. The best stories can be told over and over again – forever new – because the listener changes.”
This is where I began scribbling in the margins. I loath people whose books look unread. My own father had a complete set of ridiculous Dennis Wheatley novels in red faux-leather that he ordered once a month from a book club. He never read them and I wasn’t allowed to touch them. They were bought to match his leather chesterfield reclining armchair.
My dad was kind of a dick.
But I know a lot of people who read books without somehow managing to crease a single page. The majority of my books look like they’ve been fucked and tattooed. Like Mötley Crüe groupies.
“He had to draw what he thought was funny and hope that his audience liked it too. He was always glad to know people liked his characters or a particular storyline, but he knew he couldn’t write to that audience; he always wrote for himself“.
Film studios have still got my dial up to 4 because they can’t make a movie without worrying about some single fuckwit in Nebraska who won’t find anything in the plot to hold onto if they don’t drop some lowest common denominator bullshit into the script by rewrite number fucking 14.
These are the same people who then say sloooooooow down when you have an idea that will only work if you kick it the fuck out of an ever shrinking window of opportunity in the next five minutes.
So before I even got to Charlie Brown’s angst over the little red-haired girl I was back at the desk and writing.
Now I could have taken down an appropriate book – Stephen King’s Dark Shadow of Writer’s Block Volume IV with a foreword by Richard Bachman or Getting Things The Fuck Done by Henry Rollins – but it was the book I went to for escape that turned me in.
Maybe it was scared I was gonna fuck up more of its pages.
*And even more important to meet people outside of that zone. Otherwise the echo can be deafening.
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