Driven to drink?

Reading group on Wednesday night. Only six of us drinking, and when I got up next morning there were eight bottles to clear away! I don't think I drank much of it, but if I did, this is why.

One reason to turn to drink

Reading group last night, and another useful illustration for the writer of how differently people read and the different criteria they apply. 'Brilliant,' said Mark about our choice for discussion, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. 'Really clever marriage between journalistic and novelistic forms. The objectivity means there's a lack of sensationalism, prurience or moralising, yet it's a compulsive read, you just can't put it down.' Others differed. 'Afraid I struggled with it,' said Doug. Doug and others felt that the marriage didn't work, and that the book did in fact at times induce a prurient reaction on the reader.

See? You hone your prose, you think carefully about your structure and its effect on the reader, and then a load of crisp-chewing, wine-guzzling punters casually bring to your book their own preconceptions and taste and experience...

Ah well.

How people read

Reading group last night, Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, a tale about post-war American suburbia. Everyone without exception loved it, everyone thought it prescient, long before its time (as far as we British were concerned). Everyone found it brilliantly observed, the language utterly accurate and telling, the whole extremely moving. Only thing: only three of us found it funny as well, and I don't think anyone found it as funny as I did.

Best to confront this reality as a writer: however well you write, in the end you've no control over the way people read what you've written...

Anyone out there?

Mark, the BA cabin crew member in our reading group, has the distinction of once having been taken for a literary device: his job and his babies made it so difficult to turn up to meetings that writer Nick Royle, reading the reports of our discussions on my website, thought that he was my joke and didn't really exist. Well, he does exist, but he's now going to have a new incarnation: back in Manc at the weekend and at a barbecue I discovered that he's giving it all up to set out on a course to become an English teacher. Great! But damn it! He's a literary type after all!

Let me explain. It's always been a source of great comfort to me as a writer that most of the people in our reading group aren't what you might call 'literary types'. There's a furniture maker, a doctor, two scientists, a criminologist, a psychologist, a social work administrator, a textiles conservator and an accountant, and only three of us writers. What it seems to mean is that there are endless readers out there from all walks of life, and that when you write a book (as long as it's published!) you will reach EVERYONE...

But who am I kidding? It's not as if ours isn't a rarified group (all educated, all 'middle class' ), and anyone who reads books is by definition a 'literary type' after all (so Mark's move is hardly surprising). And when I conducted a straw poll of people in pubs and cafes for metropolitan (Issue 6), to try to assess the reading habits of the general public, the results were pretty depressing if hilarious. No one reads nowadays, was the message: 'Books is books, innit?' said one baggy-trousered lad contemptuously, switching his Walkman back on. And when I think of the educated, middle-class neighbours who declined to join the reading group 'because they didn't read'...

Whatever you do, though, don't let this get you down....

To read or to write

Anyone who has read my contribution to the Palgrave MacMillan Creative Writing Handbook (edited by Mary Luckhurst and John Singleton) will know that I strongly recommend that those who want to write should read, read and read all the time. You hear it everywhere from practised novelists: readers make writers. Most writers were big readers as children; books and the shapes of novels and the tropes of story-telling make up their psyches. And when I'm stuck as a writer, reading other people can get me writing again, something which Erica Jong has also said.

Not long ago though, Jeannette Winterson stated without shame that she finds it hard to read others while she is writing, which must be most of the time, and in the process she let the cat out of the bag. It's true for me too, in spite of all my pious urgings to others: when I'm writing I need to stick to my own psyche and (I hope) original vision, I can't go letting other people's fabulous sentences and images infiltrate my head (which, when writing is good, they inevitably do) and therefore my work. I have to read between projects. (Perhaps, while I'm at it, I should confess that I had hardly ever listened to any radio plays when I wrote my first one, Rhyme or Reason, which went on, to my shock, to receive two Sony nominations: I simply wrote what I wanted to hear, which goes against all advice to would-be radio dramatists which I've ever read.)

Three years ago, when I embarked on the long novel I've recently finished, I, the great champion of reading, was going to become a non-reader unless I did something quick. So I started a reading group, and at least once a month I was made to read a book, and got away from the self-imposed isolation I found necessary to write the novel, and had a laugh and a booze-up to boot. It's still going, I doubt we'd ever give it up now. (I report our discussions on my website.) This month we're reading Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, whose sixties novels are undergoing something of a revival with Methuen's recent reprinting. Trouble is, now, instead of a novel to write, I've got that blinking paint stripping to stop me reading it...