Books change the way we look at life

Sarah Meyrick shares her thoughts about writing her upcoming novel The Restless Wave

It’s an odd feeling when people read your work, and start commenting.

Don't get me wrong: I'm delighted anyone is reading anything I’ve written, let alone sharing their comments and thoughts. I've had some lovely, encouraging emails and conversations and cards about Knowing Anna. Sometimes it's people you know, but increasingly I'm hearing from complete strangers. How can I not be encouraged?

I hope I’m a bit more prepared for readers’ responses this time around. But it's an odd feeling that something so personal to me is out there, being read and assessed by other people. (Obvious, you might think; why write a book if you don't want anyone to read it?) And that's spot on, of course. I think what I hadn't quite appreciated, though, is how much readers bring of themselves to any work of fiction. Again, that's hardly a startling insight, but it's been brought home to me very clearly by the things people have said to me.

Sometimes that's direct: ‘It reminded me of when...’ More often, though, it's about the set of assumptions we all bring to our reading.

‘What's the message of your book?’ asks someone. Hmm. I'm not sure; I didn't write it with a message in mind. I wrote it out of a compulsion to tell a particular story. Should I have done? Should all fiction have a deep moral purpose?

The trouble is, I think that I might find that paralysing: the idea that as well as all the other things that you are trying to hold together when you are writing (characterisation, plot, pace, tension, dialogue...) you should be producing something with a message... Of course it would be wonderful to feel my work offered something of value or depth - but does it necessarily need to be improving? That sounds a bit worthy to me.

I don't say any of this in criticism of my readers, to whom I am enormously grateful. But I have found I have learned a lot about reading, and about the process of writing, through the discussions that I've had since being published.

Writing your own fiction makes you ask all sorts of interesting questions about … well, everything. But novels, particularly. What’s the point?

Well, for me reading a book is about rather more than finding a way to pass the time. Life’s too short. The novels I enjoy most as a reader are those that transport me to another world. The ones that stay with me because I have understood a different point of view, become involved with a character - not necessarily liked them but empathised with them, cared about them.

I enjoy a book that leaves me not just entertained or amused, but having learned something, shifted in my understanding, seen something from an unusual perspective. Above all, had my emotions engaged. Which means that, somehow, I have understood the human condition a little better. Best of all, had a glimpse of grace and truth.

There’s a wonderful quote from Leonard Bernstein, the great American conductor and composer. Art, he says – and he was no doubt referring to music - leaves us with ‘the feeling that something is right in the world’.

He said this: ‘The point is, art never stopped a war and never got anybody a job. That was never its function. Art cannot change events. But it can change people. It can affect people so that they are changed... because people are changed by art – enriched, ennobled, encouraged – they then act in a way that may affect the course of events... by the way they vote, they behave, the way they think.’
Trouble is, if I think too hard about ‘great art’ or enriching, ennobling or encouraging anyone, I don’t think I’d write another word.

But I suppose if push comes to shove, and I want readers to take anything away from my writing, it is that by engaging with it they find themselves entertained and intrigued and, just possibly, end up seeing the world a tiny bit differently as a result.

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