The World of Words

So many good books, so little time. If I could complete one fiction per week, I can only complete around 50 to 60 novels a year.  That is wishful thinking considering amidst my work and doing all the things I like and dislike, I do not actually get to read one fiction per week  unless it is a short one.

I also read books other than fictions. I have started reading the memoir This is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett . Here is a passage that I find inspiring for anyone who wants to write.

‘Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art you must master the craft. If you want to write , practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish, but because you long to learn how to write well, because there is something that you alone can say. Write the story , learn from it, put it away, write another story. Think of a sink pipe filled with sticky sediment. The only way to get clean water is to force a small ocean through the tap. Most of us are full up with bad stories, boring stories, self-indulgent stories, searing works of unendurable melodrama. We must get all of them out of our system in order to find the good stories that may or may not exist in the fresh water underneath. Does this sound like a lot of work without any guarantee of success ? Well yes, but it also calls into question our definition of success.’

The only way to learn to write is by writing and the pleasure is in the writing. I cannot agree more. Ms Patchett aspired to be a writer since she was twelve years old. She always knew that she wrote because it was her joy.

I find joy in reading and writing. Reading and writing are solitary acts and nothing pleases me more than allowing me the time and space to read  and write alone.  In his essay entitled “ Why Bother?” ( How to be Alone, Jonathan Franzen )  Franzen wrote this :

‘ At the heart of my despair about the novel had been a conflict between a feeling that I should Address the Culture and Bring News to the Mainstream, and my desire to write about the things closest to me , to lose myself in the characters and locales I loved. Writing, and reading too, had become a grim duty; and considering the poor pay, there is seriously no point in doing either if you’re not having fun.’

Here is what Franzen transcribed from a letter he had received from Don DeLillo, to whom he had written in distress.

‘The novel is whatever novelists are doing at a given time. If we’re not doing the big social novel fifteen years from now, it’ll probably mean our sensibilities have changed in ways that make such work less compelling to us - we won’t stop because the market die up. The writer leads, he doesn’t follow. The dynamic lives in the writer’s mind, not in the side of the audience. And if the social novel lives, but only barely, surviving in the cracks and ruts of the culture, maybe it will be taken more seriously, as an endangered spectacle. A reduced context but a more intense one.

     Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around .In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some under culture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.’

Reading and writing require one to be alone in his or her own contemplation . As I read, ideas bounce from one book to another and every book is an invitation to savor, experience , learn and grow. There are great books for every reader. In order to improve one’s writing craft,  one has to keep writing. Ideas are everywhere, writing helps me to formulate my thoughts and as I compose , I reflect. 

About Reading

Doris Lessing was conferred the 2001 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. The  speech given by her  is amongst the collection of essays and writings in Time Bites  by  Doris Lessing. 

‘There is a new kind of educated person, who may be at school and university for twenty, twenty-five years, who knows everything about a speciality, computers, the law , economics, politics, but know about nothing else, no literature, art, history, and may be heard enquiring, “But what was the Renaissance then?” “ What was the French Revolution?"

Even 50 years ago this person would have been seen as a barbarian. To have acquired an education with nothing of the old humaist background-impossible. To call oneself educated without a background of reading – impossible.

Reading , books, the literary culture, was respected, desired, for centuries.’ – Time Bites Chapter 7

I love reading fictions and through reading fictions, I see humanity for what it is and  reading enables us to connect with other minds across time and space. A novelist can provide a vivid description of a situation and the psyches of various characters so that his or her readers can possibly relate to the story and empathize with the characters, some ordinary, some quirky.  Of course not all the readers connect with a story  in the same manner  or like the same kind of writings. Reading is a pleasure only if the writing is good. Great writings engage our emotions and sometimes, when we immerse ourselves in a story and reach the end of it, we wish that the story would not end.

Julian Barnes wrote in his essay entitled :“ George Orwell and the Fucking Elephant” published in Through the Window :

‘ Most writing comes from an inchoate process; ideas may indeed propose words, but sometimes words propose ideas (both transactions occur within the same sentence) . As E. M. Forster, a frequent target of Orwell’s put it (or rather, quoted).in Aspects of the Novel : ‘ Now do I tell what I think till I see what I say?”

One of my favourite past times is to visit a local bookstore. Whenever I have to go to Kuala Lumpur for work,  nothing thrills me more than the idea of stepping into Kinokuniya at Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). I have to resist the temptation to purchase too many books as  carrying them back in my overnight bag may be a challenge.

In his essay entitled “ Wharton’s The Reef”. Julian Barnes wrote :

“NOVELS CONSIST OF words, evenly and democratically spaced; though some may acquire higher social rank by italicisation or capitalism. In most novels,this democracy spreads wider: every word is as important as every other word. In better novels, certain words have higher specific gravity than other words. This is something the better novelist does not draw attention to, but lets the better reader discover.”

Every word and every sentence in a novel are crafted by the author to tell a story. Every reader has his or her own preferences for the kind of fictions he or she reads. Reading is  a  solitary act. Nothing pleases me more than being able to pick up a novel and plunge into  the act of reading with undivided attention.

' FICTION IS THE MOST  fundamental human art. Fiction is storytelling, and our reality arguably consists of the stories we tell about ourselves. Fiction is also conservative and conventional, because the structure of its market is relatively democratic ( novelists make a living one copy at a time, bringing pleasure to large audiences) , and because a novel asks for ten or twenty hours of solitary attentiveness from each member of its audience. You can walk past a painting fifty times before you begin to appreciate it. You can drift in and out of a Bartok sonata until its structures dawn on you. But a difficult novel just sits there on your shelf unread-unless you happen to be a student, in which case you’re forced to turn the pages of Woolf and Beckett.'  -  How to be alone by Jonathan Franzen.