I recently read this fine review of Jonathan Gibbs’s new novel The Large Door (which I have not yet read, though I admire his first novel, Randall, a great deal) and this passage in particular set me thinking:
“There are readers for whom this sort of thing is pretentious, an invitation to toss a novel aside. There are readers for whom it’s a snooze — been there, done that, so much pastiche of Pirandello’s Six Characters (1921) — and there are those for whom it’s not quite a deal-breaker so much as an irritant, a blot on an otherwise worthwhile book. In the case of The Large Door, however, I think it’s something else, very much worth dwelling on. It’s not just a feature of the novel’s design, I think, but also an integral component of its moral and political purposes. “
The passage seemed important to me not so much as a comment on The Large Door itself – as I say, I haven’t read it yet – but as an insight into ambition: who are we writing for and who do we hope to reach? In a word, what type of book are we intending?
Of course the answers to these questions will be different for every writer. Nor is it a simple question of subject matter. I believe one could take the outline subject of any book – even down to its key sequences and significant plot points – and recast it in any guise one might wish. I often use the example of how I might prefer A Game of Thrones as rewritten by Hilary Mantel, but it can work the other way, too – imagine Nick Hornby having a go at Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser. Not an experiment I would personally be in favour of, but even as I write I am having fun imagining how many readers might prefer the Hornby version to the original.
What I am talking about here is not subject, but intention. Why do we write, and for whom? When Jonathan Gibbs was writing The Large Door, I am guessing he knew from the outset – all hopes and matters of idealism aside – that the manner of its execution would, to paraphrase the reviewer, be an irritant, maybe even a goad to some readers. Whilst this knowledge might be a sadness for Gibbs or an annoyance, we know already from the fact of The Large Door’s existence that it is not a deterrent. The act of writing the book – the necessity of writing the book – is justification enough. If readers will come, let them come – let them come in droves. But readers are not the novel’s only raison d’etre.
Many writers insist that when they are writing they write for themselves, they don’t think about the reader. A noble sentiment, even a necessary one, but is it true? Even Emily Dickinson wanted to be read. Do we not all, when we are writing, have in mind if not our ideal reader then our ideal writer, the writer who drives us forward, the writer whose audience we would like to share, the writer – if we dare admit it – we would most like to impress?
It is useful to acknowledge the truth of this, because it opens a window on to the summit of our ambition. Ambition is often seen as a dirty word, but for me it is a powerful word as well as an honest one, an abstraction that is physically revealed in the very act of writing.
How far do we want to climb? I’m not talking about a universal standard, a clearly measurable distance. It is a matter of the kind of terrain we wish to traverse.
My mentors have always been other writers . Not necessarily writers I have ever met or spoken to in person, but whose words on the page provide not a template but an ideal and – most importantly of all – a challenge.
Name our mentors – those personal to us – and we learn a substantial amount about who we are as writers and where we want to go. There’s an experiment I am in favour of. The results are invariably fascinating and – best of all – never quite what we expected when we started out.