Why You Should Write Like A Reader
If you love reading books, you can write them!
Hello Team CCC! Happy Bank Holiday to all who celebrate!
***The final WRITE LIKE A READER course of 2024 will be happening on Sunday evenings, starting from Sunday 27th October at 7.30PM, GMT. There will be five weekly 90 minute session taught over Zoom, so you can join us from anywhere. Every session is recorded and available to watch on catch up, so you don’t need to worry if you can’t make a Sunday.
I believe that if you read and love novels, you can write one. This week, I’ve written about why I think writing like a reader is vital - and about what reading has taught me about writing. There’s more information about the course at the end of the post. If you’d like pricing information and the full syllabus, email creativeconfidenceclinic@gmail.com ***
Just after I sold my first novel, Insatiable, I read Into The Woods – How Stories Work And Why We Tell Them by John Yorke. Yorke’s book is fascinating. Thorough, thoughtful, smart and deliciously nerdy. I loved it, but I was also very relieved that I was reading it after I’d finished my novel. With the advantage of hindsight, I could understand that much of storytelling is instinctive. Readers write novels, and poems, and screenplays. Readers communicate. Readers are seekers, we long to be uplifted, entertained and transported. Readers are constantly learning and absorbing information about how stories are told. Every time we pick up a story, we’re discovering something new about rhythm and technique, even when – especially when – we’re reading for fun, and fun alone.
If I’d read about fiction theory before I started writing, I would have felt overwhelmed. The phrase ‘rising action’ would have forced a wave of dread up from my gut and all the way to the back of my neck. The idea of the five-act structure would have terrified me. I could no more come up with one of those on my own than I could go off and do some long division. I suspected that ‘proper’ novelists were wizards and mathematicians, composers capable of imagining hundreds and thousands of different notes played at the same time. But when I read Yorke’s book, I was dumbstruck. I’d done everything he said and done it well! I wasn’t especially clever. I was no mathematician, or wizard. But I’d figured it out, somewhere between Dick King Smith and Ali Smith. Loving stories had taught me all the theory I needed.
Insatiable was not the first novel I’d tried to write. When I was 13 or 14 – and I’m physically cringing as I write this, I don’t want to finish the sentence, I want to curl up and hide inside my own rib cage – I attempted to write a novel about a teenage girl who lives in the countryside who becomes embroiled in an emotionally toxic drug fuelled love triangle with people who live in Manhattan. I think I managed eight very inky pages in an exercise book before a teacher discovered it and staged a mental health intervention.
On and off, I’d have ideas, and I’d fail to sit down and stick with them. I tried to write sad, dark, difficult, books about women who disappeared and /or got murdered – because I had a notion that was what people valued in contemporary fiction. This was even though I only ever really enjoyed reading Marian Keyes, and everything else seemed a bit like eating salad. (Sometimes it was surprisingly nice! You know, for a salad.) I tried to write like Marian Keyes – this was a much happier experience, but my basic idea – a young woman (who had one been a teenage girl living in the countryside, not embroiled in any druggy urban love triangles) who drinks a lot of wine, has a lot of credit card debt, and works for a magazine - didn’t really have a plot. I hoped one would come to me. And I was no Marian Keyes. Every time I tried, I realised that there was a gap between the way her novels made me feel (instantly seen, known, held, wry, joyous, moved) and the way it might feel to try to write one. Her words engendered a depth of gorgeous feelings in the reader. Wielding my words did not engender a depth of anything. Talent wise, industrial, high-powered tools were required. I had a nail file.
When I wrote my first* book, How To Be A Grown-Up, I had been working as a journalist for almost ten years. I’d been practising my craft, meeting deadlines, working hard, working fast, learning how to get it done, and crucially, how to write to be read. At the time, HTBAGU was the book I wanted to read. A kind book, a book that met the needs of its readers. People who were supposed to be legal adults, but who sometimes felt more like toddlers in a trench coat. A book that told its readers that they were doing much, much better than they thought they were – and that being a grown up isn’t about being great at saving money and learning how dangly earrings could take you from day to night. It’s about how we must learn to accept emotional custody of ourselves. We’re allowed to decide how we live, and we’re allowed to trust our instincts.
Obviously, I really wanted to write a novel. But I didn’t think I could do it. I could only think of the ways in which I could fail, and I felt too scared to try. I didn’t really have an idea other than the central theme I was exploring in HTBAGU. ‘Anxious person becomes less anxious’ wasn’t enough of a story. Not in my hands, not for my first attempt. When I wrote HTBAGU, I brought all my ‘Marian Keyes feelings’ to the page – I longed to create something that might make a reader feel uplifted, loved and held. Still, years of writing for newspapers and magazines had helped me to find my own voice, and the confidence to use it.
After I wrote HTBAGU, I realised I’d been so frightened of trying and failing. It demystified the process of writing a book. I realised that I’d been waiting for permission to write, and deciding, ahead of time, that my work would never be perfect so why bother? When HTBAGU was out in the world, I started to see past my fear, and wonder what else I might be capable of. I felt excited. Most importantly, I realised that publishing a book only changes you in the way that learning to ride a bike changes you. Being perceived as a bike rider doesn’t necessarily bring you better professional opportunities, or get you invited to more exciting parties. The best things happen when you’re concentrating on riding the bike.
This is what learning to write like a reader has taught me. I love the ride. I love watching talented riders on beautiful bikes. I love the way reading makes me feel, and every book I pick up teaches me something about how to conjure those feelings in other readers. Writing like a reader is how I square a contradiction, and how I can hold two opposing truths in my heart and believe them both. The first is that we must write to serve our readers, and our story. We put our egos and selves to one side, and we write without an agenda. Our readers need space for their hope and vulnerability. It’s not fair of us to ask anything of them, especially if we secretly wish for readers to validate, envy or pity us. If a story is full of ‘I’, there is no room for ‘You’.
The second is that we’re the readers. We all come to books craving something – excitement, distraction, information, love, proof, the feeling of being seen and known – we know precisely what we want from any story. When a reader writes, they’re uniquely qualified to deliver this. My early attempts at fiction didn’t work because I was trying to write for a reader that I didn’t really know. When I write badly, it’s usually because I’m trying to perform the role of ‘author’. When I write well, it’s because I’m writing as generously and respectfully as I can, to address the reader whose needs I understand the best.
Being a reader has taught me everything I know about writing. More importantly, I write because I read. I’m a reader first. I long to tell stories because I don’t think there’s anything more delicious than being swept up inside a story. I write because stories nourish and stretch my imagination, and because reading fills me with a sense of yearning that I can’t satisfy. I never want it to be satisfied. No story is definitive – not Middlemarch, not Persuasion, not The Davinci Code. There is always an alternative perspective to explore, a secret, a character with more to say, a new version of events. Books are in constant conversation with each other, and to write like a reader is to add your voice to the glorious babble and find a space to harmonise within it.
The Write Like A Reader course begins on Sunday 27th October. This is the last chance to join the course in 2024. I’ll be teaching five 90 minute sessions over Zoom, and every session will be recorded, so if you miss one, you can watch it on catch up. The course is suitable for writers at any stage – it has been designed to boost your confidence, to show you how much you already know about storytelling and to make you feel excited about your writing.
The course costs £350 (inclusive) or £295 for paying Substack subscribers. If you’d like me to send you the full syllabus, outlining what we cover over the sessions – Beginnings, Character, Plot, Pacing and Endings – email creativeconfidenceclinic@gmail.com. And if you’re interested in manuscript feedback, or a one to one mentoring session, I’d love to hear from you too.
 (*technically my first book was an ebook called the Wickedly Unofficial Guide To Made In Chelsea, which was followed by a dating book, commissioned by a publisher, called Meeting Your Match. Then the ebook was bought and republished by a different publisher. I also ghostwrote a book for someone in the cast of Made In Chelsea which was cancelled by the publisher because the cast member - how can I put this?!- failed to comply with their contractual obligations)