To Kindle or not to Kindle

A classic novel from 1942, general thoughts, and a writing tip

My Kindle got stolen the other week – by someone whose first purchase on it was a Bible. May they find it in what they need.

It’s loaded with books I’ve bought as 99p bargains. But then my shelves are loaded with unread books too. Mostly of a more literary quality. An advantage of books is that nobody is likely to steal one. It’s their time!

Many are books I’ve started and then set aside as my enthusiasm waned. (The moment I start talking about a book, saying how much I’m enjoying it, I know I’ll set it aside pretty soon. I talk to convince myself of what I no longer believe.)

Books do wait to truly meet you. One that has travelled with me for years is Frank Waters’ The Man Who Killed the Deer. The author has long been important to me – in the last year of his life I tracked him down to his home in Tucson for a phone conversation and thanked him for what I had read. Yet my reading of this classic novel kept stalling.

Now it’s what I’ve needed. The book distills Frank Waters’ learning from his time on the pueblos of the SouthWest. It’s clear-eyed, far from sentimentalizing the American Indians, and is suffused with their wisdom, in particular on their primary relationship with Mother Earth. A slim book, it took me a week, for it kept triggering new and deep reflections on life that I needed time to sit with.

I’ve been yearning for New Mexico of late, where I once spent seven years. In its setting the book whisked me back there.

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I took another journey to the US in the night, listening in to the Harris / Trump debate from 2am in the morning. It was a wonderfully adroit performance from Harris (the antithesis of the sadness of Biden’s last stand in June), with so many great word choices, nimble tales, and setting of traps. So inevitably did Trump snap up her bait each time, it could have been called the Great de-Bait.

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I’m between projects at the moment – which means I keep working away at several. One is a memoir looking at the affects of my father on his children – think Festen for clues. Were he alive today, it would be his 112^th birthday. The other day I found a letter to me from his mother in neat handwriting learned from when she was a child in the 1880s.

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And so to writing tips.

There’s one on offer today.

You need to attract the reader out of their world and into yours. Remember, their world is wild with distractions. You’re lucky to have their attention for even a moment and it may not last. Lead the reader from the first sentence and into the second and then the third and you likely have them: they are inside your book and looking around. So here’s the clue.  At the start of your piece, make sure to LOCATE them. Show the reader where your scene is set. Take them from their world into yours.

An example? Here’s one from my shelves, the start of Penelope Fitzgerald’s Innocence.

“Anyone can tell when they are passing the Ridolfi villa, the Ricordanza, because of the stone statues of what are known as ‘the Dwarfs’ on the highest part of the surrounding walls. You see them best from the right hand side of the road, driving toward Val de Presa.”

Do you see how she does it? You’re straight inside the scene, deftly located, looking up, seeing a lot and wanting more. A whole novel lies ahead.