I can’t stop reading, really. I’m the sort of person who can’t sit at the table and talk to someone if there’s junk mail in my line of vision. I’ll keep glancing to the side, unable to tear my eyes away from that donation solicitation or credit-card offer. I take my Kindle with me when I’m about to take a shower and read as I get undressed, then balance it on the vanity and pick it up again as soon as I’m out and dried off. I can’t help myself: if there are words in front of me, I have to read them, and if they’re interesting words–if they form a narrative–I will plunge right into them, losing myself in the experience of the story.
A lot of people don’t read this way. I know this, because I married one of them. My husband has never–or almost never–been lost in a book. He rarely reads fiction, and when he does, it tends to be literary fiction, George Saunders or Per Petterson or Cormac McCarthy. Witty books. Careful books. Beautiful books. But not the sort of books I love. Not books that are all about the story.
One of the things I feared when I started writing–and one of the things that might have kept me from writing for a long time–was that I would start to read like a writer. That the act of reading would become the act of critique, so that I couldn’t experience a novel anymore without picking it apart in my head at the same time. That I would lose the ability to plunge in.
Recently, I thought maybe, just possibly, I had. I read a book by one of my favorite romance novelists, and I never got sucked into it. It was category romance, short and hot and fun, but it didn’t grab me. I think it took me four or five days to read it, which is way outside the normal range. I often read romance novels in a day, fitting the reading in around my work and taking care of my son, around cooking and exercise and conversation and all the other things that make up my life. This book took me so long to finish that my husband started asking me why I didn’t just stop reading it and pick up a different one, but I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to figure out what was wrong with it. Or, rather, I wanted to figure out if there was something wrong with the book–if Favorite Author had written a dud–or if there was something wrong with me.
The characters were . . . fine. The plot was . . . fine. The sex scenes were . . . fine. I couldn’t put my finger on why I didn’t want to read it. It just didn’t have any zing. I didn’t care. I was rooting for the characters’ happy ending, but only in the way I’d root for someone competing on television. They weren’t my characters. Their problems weren’t my problems. They didn’t matter.
I did eventually finish, and then last night I started a new book, Harper Fox’s Life After Joe. And, thank goodness, I plunged right in. The first chapter was seedy, depressing, devastating. The next wasn’t much more uplifting. The first-person narrator is a traffic accident, painful to watch, but riveting, too. I didn’t particularly like him, but I did root for him. I wanted him to get his shit together and find happiness. I was relieved when he did. I couldn’t put the damn book down.
Which isn’t to say that I didn’t notice writerly things about it I may not have picked up on before I started writing. Details. Scene structures. Phrasing. But they didn’t distract me. They didn’t pull me out of the plunge.
The experience reassures me that it’s possible to be a writer without losing the joy of being a reader, and I’m so grateful for that.
But it also reminds me how important it is to raise the stakes. I think, on reflection, that what’s wrong with Favorite Author’s latest is that there isn’t enough tension. The emotional conflict isn’t deep enough, the stakes aren’t high enough, and I never for a second believed that the happily ever after was in jeopardy. It was a foregone conclusion. The characters’ issues were wrinkles. All they needed was an ironing, or even ten minutes in a steamy bathroom and a good shake.
In Life After Joe, on the other hand, Fox put her characters through hell. The narrator started out screwed up, got worse, met the perfect man, screwed it up, fixed it, lost him, found him, nearly lost him again, found him, nearly lost him again, and then aaah… the ending. And the book isn’t even that long.
When I first started writing, I despised putting my characters through this sort of pain. I wanted them to hold hands and kiss and have a grand time. But lately, I’m starting to enjoy coming up with novel ways to torture them, because the payoff is so much bigger when you finally fix them up again. I want to write romance with some realism, but I have to keep reminding myself that readers like me don’t plunge into novels because they want a fix of reality. They want epics. Highs and lows. They want Atlanta to burn and Scarlett to lose the baby and get dirt under her fingernails before she can have Rhett, because forcing her to drink chicory coffee isn’t hardship enough.
I can do that. I can totally do that.
