Reading matters

Blogging again, and hopefully with the kind of regularity of the time before I started working on my memoir. The opus I commenced in October 2012 on the orders of my daughter (who wanted me to account for my ill-spent youth) grew to 140 pages in time to bind the work in progress as a Christmas gift. Since then another 60 pages have been added. I have reached 1976 in this accounting of my doings, the year in which I was exactly half the age I am now. However, I feel that it is time to take a hiatus and a break from navel gazing. 

Jessica must accept that the final version of my autobiography may only be finished for next Christmas!

During the months of Proustian reflection I have not stopped reading. And the way of my reading has lead me to draw some conclusions I find quite enlightening.

On the 1st of November last year my Amazonian guide (whom I prefer t picture as lithe and ethereal!) suggested that a book by Phil Rickman might be to my taste. The Remains of an Altar introduced me to a world inhabited by characters I found compelling and his Merrily Watkins series is well described by the author himself here.

When I finished the book I certainly wanted more and ten further Kindle downloads ensued. For a good eight or nine weeks I immersed myself in the storyworld created by Rickman.

There was only one mitigation of the reading pleasure... I realized that my Amazonian was incapable of informing me of the correct running order of the books. For too long I was jumping back and forth in time because the Kindle listings were inconsistent in identifying the sequencing of what I would have preferred to be a linear narrative. 

Imagine watching episodes of a prime-time television series out of order... it cannot make for the maximum viewer satisfaction! I shall keep the Merrily Watkins stores archived and in a few years read them again in the order they were written.

A few weeks ago, after there was no more being told about the goings on in Rickman's captivating village of Lewardine, I was pointed in the direction of a very different location. The trilogy of books by Peter May is set on the Hebridean island of Lewis.

These were properly numbered and the reading experience was thus a real improvement. In a way both Rickman and May can be seen as writing in a similar genre. In both locations the weather conditions are daunting. May even has a conflicted cleric, although as a secondary character. In both series the authors betray a deep interest in popular music.

But this blog post is not about content. It is rather about form. I realize how much I am appreciative of seriality, of long-form storytelling. As opposed to the old notion of bookstore browsing, Kindle facilitates access to prose fiction for consumption in a manner very much like following a favourite television series. And when the reader has the good fortune to encounter a hitherto undiscovered body of work which has built up over many years to become a coherent ensemble then the three hours spent reading each evening is time passed with characters and with subject matter which are pleasurably addictive.

Suddenly there came for me the realization that this is a mode of recipience of entertainment content which is absolutely analagous to following a television soap opera, with a daily return to a storyworld in which the reader/viewer feels at home. Having signed off on almost a thousand episodes of half-hour daily drama as producer I should have come to this conclusion much sooner, I confess

That sudden moment of enlightenment... earlier this week... also provides an explanation for the difficulties I face as a writer. I started trying to write novels fifteen years ago, when my 'soaps' were getting audiences of up to six million viewers in Germany. Since they were targeted at a young and impressionable demographic there were quite stringent limitations on the stories we could tell. My own writing efforts were an attempt to be less 'politically correct', more daring, a bit provocative.

And yet with seven stand-alone manuscripts more or less finished I now know their weakness. As a writer of 'thrillers' I have this terrible reluctance to let any of my characters die! I would wish for them to thrive and be part of a continuing unresolved narrative... just like a classic soap opera!

Given that almost nobody has bought the only novel I have self-published via Kindle I feel the need now to go back and see how I can prioritize seriality in what I have written and how to apply it in what I write in the future. And at the same time profit from the technologies which are developing with regard to to that other important issue... transmediality, permitting audio-visually enhanced e-books to be accessed on a multiplicity of platforms.

My own memoir can never be commercialized. Not because the story of my life is utterly boring, but because I have enhanced the text with illustrative material to which I hold no rights. The phto at the top of this post gives an impression of this very exciting way of writing with both words and pictures. The work is, when all is said and done, intended for only one reader.

But the labours involved in my memoir, combined with the experience of non-linear frustrations in respect of Rickman's 'soap opera', have made the past three months a very interesting and perhaps instructive season.