By Susan Wilson
Guest Columnist
I’m a
“Goodreads” author and as such I get, from time to time, questions from readers
such as: What books are on your summer
reading list, and Who is your favorite fictional couple and
why? The abridged answers are: I generally don’t do reading lists, and
Barbara Kingsolver’s Dellarobbia and Cub from Flight Behavior. Sometimes the questions are like those I get at
book talks, readers looking for the magic formula to becoming writers. Some
thoughtful readers are simply looking for clarification. I’ve been asked how I
knew so much about pit bulls and family dysfunction (possibly looking for some
personal revelations), and, are my books available in a Kindle format? Answers:
Research and observation; and, yes.
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| Susan Wilson |
However,
I recently received a question that really kind of threw me: If I could enter any fictional world, where
would it be and what would I do?
I
found myself with a complete failure of imagination. I drew a complete blank.
How could that be? I’m often accused of being a voracious reader, and of the
thousand books I’ve read (give or take) why didn’t one pop into my mind as the
fictional world I’d most like to visit? And then it hit me. I create that world for myself. Where I
want to be, I go. In my work, I’ve invented some wonderful locations, Hawke’s
Cove, Cameo Lake, Moose River Junction, Harmony Farms. I’ve also written my characters into
real places that I like, the Berkshires, Boston, etc. These places, real and
imagined, are the places I can go and where I put my characters to the
test.
It is
said that a good book takes you out of your world and deposits you into that of
the author, which is a bit like being invited into someone’s active
imagination. If you’re a good author, you are invisible even as your readers
find themselves poking around in your thoughts. As an author, I try hard to
create a world that readers wish to visit, if not inhabit, that is, come bide
awhile with me. In essence, readers are already inside the book if the work is
compelling enough. A good writer opens the reader’s inner eye, the seeing is
all in the mind, but vivid for all that. The experience is as real as if the
reader actually were standing beside the protagonist.
Having
said that, I think that perhaps that reader meant not so much the physical
environment, but to be a part of the story that takes place within that world. The
setting may be England, but the story is a lie well told that ruins a life – Ian
McEwan’s Atonement or Depression era
North Dakota and the hard scrabble existence of the disaffected poor in Wallace
Stegner’s Big Rock Candy Mountain.
Would I want to magically drop into postwar England and hang out with Briony
Tallis and Robbie Turner? The reader asked, what
would I do, and maybe I’m just thinking like an author, but in such a
circumstance, I could do nothing without changing McEwan’s novel.
One
of the cleverest book series I’ve ever encountered is that of Jasper Fforde’s
heroine, Thursday Next. Our intrepid protagonist literally enters books to
solve crimes. Miss Havisham is her mentor and the plock-plocking Dodo is her
companion animal. Fforde’s imagination should be bottled and sold by the case
to dried-up old writers like me.
My
eight-year-old granddaughter is a voracious consumer of chapter books that
involve fairies. These are not the fairies of my childhood, Tinkerbelle and her
ilk, but empowered girl-fairies with missions to accomplish, adventures to
have. Basically they’re the equivalent of bodice-ripper romances or cheap
detective novels for kids. She’s not ready to enter the thicker environs of,
say, J. K. Rowling, but these little books are certainly a gateway read. And
she is clearly drawn into this magical world. I can see it on her face. She is
a child and as such is capable still of entering fully into an imaginary world.
On another note, my three-year-old grandson asked me if I wanted to “watch” a
book with him. I don’t know if that means he is already capable of being so
immersed in a story that it feels like he’s “watching” it, or if he equates
reading with screen time. Either way, indulge me here. It was cute.
I
think that I have lost the ability to concentrate enough to lose myself. I
read, and the birds on the feeder catch my eye. Go back to the book, read the
same paragraph, and a squirrel takes an acrobatic stance to raid the feeder.
I’m surfing, not immersed. I long for the days when everything around me faded into
the background as I read. As a myopic middle-grader, my refuge was in the books
that our school library offered. As I think back, that was one very well-stocked
rural school library. I read Les
Miserables. I stumbled over the French names, but I did it. I was at the
barricades. I read Great Expectations
and I was creeped out by Miss Havisham. I was encouraged by the sainted Mrs.
Bean to read the hard books, the challenging ones. Give me an indoor recess and
I was in heaven. I was in another world. Today I am too much in the world. Deadlines,
chores, responsibilities, and, if I’m honest, social media, all vie for my
attention. And then, increasingly rarely, but oh so magically, a book comes
along that puts all else into the background, a book that does invite me into
another world. Maybe it’s a world like my own, or a world very different, but
the author’s voice and characters and setting are so compelling that I can
break away from myself and become one with the book. Oh so rare.
Stephanie
Kallos is one author whose work blows my mind. She writes characters that beg
to be brought home and introduced to the family. Sing Them Home, Broken for You and Language Arts are firmly on my list of top reads. Katarina Bivald’s The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend is another that took me out
of my world and deposited me in a little town in Iowa peopled with, well,
people I’d like to know. So I know it’s not impossible to be carried away by a
book, it just has to be a good one, and by “good one” I mean one in which the
author has successfully disappeared behind the curtain. No authorial ticks,
just authorial sleight of hand, tricking me into forgetting that I’m reading. And
that’s the book world I want to be in.
Link:
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Susan Wilson is a New York
Times bestselling author. Her newest novel, Two
Good Dogs, was published in March 2017.