The Fundamental Questions of Reading

This appeared as a “public” post on my Patreon a couple of weeks ago. If you like this kind of thing and want more on a regular basis, please consider subscribing…?

So this is an Open Post – a combination of an “On My Bookshelf” and “Writing School” posts, but Open To All Comers, in a periodic attempt to showcase the contents that y’all might expect if you become a supporting member of this Patreon.

The open question under discussion is all bound up in the basic Five Questions (the How, What, Where, Why, Who constellation), the Inchoate Question (“What if?”), and the Eight Deadly Words, of which I may have spoken before… but we will get to that.

Let me begin by introducing you to a writer by the name of John Marrs. I found one of his books, online, and the premise GOT ME GOOD – the novel was called “The One” (2018)  and the story, according to the back blurb, was interesting what if (there it goes, the What If question…) the finding of your life’s soulmate was literally genetic – and there was a service whereby you took a swab off your cheek, sent it in to be analysed, and received in return the identity of your ideal mate? Wham bam thank you ma’am, you don’t need to blunder about doing all that foolish and fallible “courting”, no need for trial and error, no need for heartbreak, none of that. You sends off your genetic code and someone else’s genetic code matches exactly and it’s a guaranteed happily ever after, right? Okay. I was interested. I have a genetics background, after all, and while the genetics of this all sounded cockamamie up the wazoo I found it an interesting bedankenexperiment. So I got a copy of the book – and perhaps somewhat presciently I bought it second hand. While hunting for that I discovered later novels by the same guy, both equally enticing as potential what-if premises – one to do with the spread of identity and information in today’s cyberworld (“Minders”, 2020), and one about a dystopian world where actually having a family is a competition you can “win”,  a privilege, conveyed by wannabe parents being issued a “virtual baby” to raise and then competing for the chance to achieve the possibility of a “real baby” if they are adjudged to have done well enough (“The Family Experiment”, 2024) – and acquired them both.

“The One” arrived with a “Soon To Be A Major TV Series” sticker on its cover; “The Family Experiment” turned up with the confirmation that the Netflix series apparently actually did happen (I’ve never actually heard of it but then I don’t have Netflix so don’t take that as gospel.) The interesting dots to be connected are the references to the “word of mouth sensation ‘The One’ ”  followed by “the best-selling author of ‘The One’.” Let’s just pause right there for a second, and discuss this in terms of the Fundamental Questions. Just how does one leap from a ‘word of mouth sensation’ to a ‘best selling author’? This is the kind of trajectory anyone who sets out to carve a successful literary career basically dreams of – you write a book, enough people read it and talk about it, you get a movie contract, and you get catapulted to a “bestselling” status. In order to accomplish that, though, you do need the cooperation of a helluvalot of people willing to be that word-of-mouth bridge. This is where that weird and incomprehensible piece of a writing career comes in – pure bloody unadulterated luck, as something hits the ground running, sticks the landing in a perfect moment or social context, and leaves skid marks as it levitates into the stratosphere. It probably doesn’t happen all that often but when it does happen it is a flash-bang thing to watch, and it probably ignites a hundred other wannabe careers which will themselves go nowhere much because they fail to find their “moment” as the inspiring volume has done. How do you get word of mouth going? Damned if I know. If I did I would be that much more “successful” myself. But it happens and when it happens it’s astonishing. And once it happens it’s a snowball running downhill and it’s a “to them that has already, all else shall be given” situation. Because such books and such authors immediately garner marketing support (because the publishers backing the work can smell money in the water, as it were), and then become even more successful, and then get MORE support, which of course has to come from somewhere and it usually comes from “less successful” books and authors, who then do worse as the original author does better, and so it goes. Publishing can be a cutthroat business, and don’t let anyone tell you different.

But, anyway. Here we are. I now have three books with interesting premises in hand, and I embarked on reading “The One” with some anticipation.

That happened almost a year ago. I picked it up, took it out on my brand new catio, and sat there with the book and my cats and a glass of cool lemonade for my “summer read”.

I read about 150 pages of it. At least, that’s where my bookmark stopped. Then I put it down, with its kindred-books by the same author, and I… simply never picked it up again.

Which brings us to those Eight Deadly Words that I mentioned earlier, and they are reading-ending words (and I would think word-of-mouth-ending words too, but what do I know). The words are “I DON’T CARE WHAT HAPPENS TO THOSE PEOPLE.”

I simply… didn’t care enough about what happened to the protagonists of “The One” to continue reading the book.

I tried picking up “Minders”.

The same thing happened.

I flipped through “The Family Experiment”. I didn’t find a great deal to hold me, other than the basic idea.

But an idea is not a story, is not a book. It needs a coherent plot. And most of all it needs protagonists to carry that plot, and those protagonists must engage your interest and your empathy to the point that you care deeply about what happens to them in the context of that plot. The moment you lose that fellow feeling for the protagonists, the moment you stop caring about what actually happens to them, no matter how stellar the idea behind the plot actually is your interest… just wanders. And when your interest wanders what happens is that you put the book down somewhere in the middle and you simply forget to pick it up again. I looked at where my bookmark is in “The One”, and I don’t even remember who the people on that particular page WERE, never mind what their problems were or why I would have cared about it. This is…not good.  At all. One of the reasons is that these books are bright and shallow – they were WRITTEN for the screen and not an actual reader of an actual book. They don’t expect you, the reader, to engage; all they want from you is that you pay your money, for an “entry fee” as it were, and then you can shut your mind down completely and you can simply recognize where they are coloring by numbers and not tax your mind too much by being kept interested and on edge enough to care what happens next (because it is very clear that everything is going to end up being tied up with a nice neat bow in the end, and you don’t have to put in too much of an effort for that to happen). In fact, let me just offer up the apocryphal tale of finding a paperback book in the seat pocket of the seat in front of you on an airplane, and picking it up to read it because you have nothing else constructive to do… and then discovering that the person who left it there in the first place couldn’t be bothered to keep the book but just ripped out the last chapter as they left so that they could know how it ended, as it were, leaving the mutilated volume there for the frustrated person who happened to pick it up next. These John Marrs books are precisely the sort of books that qualify for such treatment. They are the kind of books that you pick up when you are bored out of your mind – on a long trip for instance – but which you don’t care enough to keep. They’re EPHEMERA. They have no real lasting value and yes they sell like hot cakes because quite simply they’re DISPOSABLE. So what we have here are books with a high “what if” quotient, and a variable set of answers to the fundamental questions (who reads these books? People with nothing better to do. Why do they read them? Same answer, because they have nothing better to do. Where do they read them? Often in situations and in places like I mentioned, to pass the time on long trips and suchlike. Same applies to the “when” question. How do they read them? Without getting attached or intrigued, simply and purely for an empty entertainment value. Now, of course, there’s nothing wrong with reading purely for entertainment – as long as you’re aware that you are doing it, that you are consuming the literary equivalent of candyfloss, all sweet promise and empty air and no substance whatsoever (leaving you hungry even after you think that you have eaten). But what buries them, for me, is the high eight-deadly-words score. I don’t register these characters. They have no substance. They have no dimensions; they are collectively a set of paper dolls or cardboard cutouts, and not real people or people whom you can think of as being real. They tend to make stupid decisions and choices because they need to do so in order to keep the plot going for as long as a hefty novel-length volume you can sell in airport bookstores needs the plot to go, and after a while you just get annoyed at them for doing that – and so you abandon them and forget them.

If you’re planning on a trip in your near future, you could probably do worse than these books of which we speak here. But that’s not really a high recommendation. Choose wisely, as it were.

But for me – and this is your Writing School part of this post – what truly matters is the engagement with the people who are carrying your story. And yes, the story has to be strong, too, but basically the people who are living that story  need to be the sort of characters with whom you, the reader, are going to engage sufficiently for the story to have staying power. If that fails no story can really succeed. For me, anyway. YMMV. And it is clear that for values of “success” that isn’t really a criterion as such – because it is clear that John Marrs is a “success” – he is a bestselling author, he has had his work adapted to screen, everything, in fact, that paints a successful career. And enough people are reading him and paying for the pleasure (and word-of-mouthing him) that he is probably very well off for it. But I started THREE OF HIS BOOKS and I haven’t finished a single one of them. That too is a criterion, take it as you like. But, for me, a book – a story – no matter how wonderful the basic idea from which it springs – needs to have depth, and substance, and a certain 3-dimensional quality that makes me able to believe that it has a certain existence beyond the pages in which I am encountering it. And the Marrs books – all of which are slated to go on my “to be taken to the local second hand store ASAP” pile. They have not, in my own context, risen to being deserving of a permanent place on my shelves. They’re the kind of book that is easily left in the seat pocket of an airline seat with the last chapter ripped out.