Karl Whitney: Don’t believe everything that you hear about reading (and writing)

When asking yourself when is the right time to give up on a piece, remember that nothing put aside is truly done

Writer Karl Whitney says that you can be your own best critic and first — or only — reader, so finish short things and build from there.

You hear an awful lot of bad advice about reading — and, for that matter, a lot of bad advice about writing too.

When do you give up on reading a book? Should you give it 50 pages, then put it aside? 

Or are you more the sort to throw it out the window if the first sentence isn’t up to scratch? 

Or should you suppress your urge to give up and instead plough on?

I recently heard a bumptious Irish broadcaster — who has famously relocated to Britain and awkwardly grafted his high-energy, self-consciously “nerdy” style to a heavily playlisted, dead-eyed commercial radio station — suggest the 50-page rule, while patronisingly attempting to encourage greater literacy amongst his mostly British listeners.

“You can read anything,” he said, suggesting as a starting point the humble beer mat.

A couple of weeks later, I started on an intimidatingly long book that I had received at Christmas.

I hadn’t read many reviews, but it was on a topic that’s of interest to anyone who uses social media and technology, so I was intrigued and willing to give it a chance. 

It sat on the desk for a few weeks while I read something else.

Eventually, I began, gave it 50 pages, and was slightly underwhelmed.

However, I gave it 50 more, and then another 50.

Now I’m around the 300-page mark, which is halfway through, and I’ll keep reading; I found that I had to make a bit of an effort with it, and eventually that effort paid off.

Not all books are the same — they don’t all jump into your lap and flatter you — and pretending that they are is a mistake. 

So to hell with the 50-page “rule”, I say. (If it is a rule — which it isn’t.)

OK, so when do you give up on writing something?

I saw some advice online that encouraged would-be writers to “finish everything” they’re working on.

Not bad advice at all — until you think about it for a minute.

I won’t argue against the sense of completion. It’s good advice for, say, a short story or an article, but if you decide to write a 700-page work of historical fiction and run out of steam around, say, the 50-page mark, it’s worth reconsidering what you’re doing.

I don’t mean give up.

Instead, think things through. Have you done enough research? Is this really what you wanted to do with this project? 

Are you certain you want to grimly plough on with it for another 200,000 words?

Writing is a process of exploration, but it is not only that. Some things are best left unfinished — or, to look at it another way: Nothing put aside is truly done with. You might return to it, or you might take some element of that discarded draft and re-employ it in a future work.

But that question of when to give up — or, to put it another way, of when to think critically about what you have and where you’re going with it, shouldn’t be arbitrarily imposed.

You write until you hit a snag, and then you either discover a solution or put it aside to go back to in a day or a year or a decade.

More advice gleaned from the internet: That you should know exactly where you’re going when you put pen to paper. 

I saw this recently and it sounded like particularly bad advice, and deeply intimidating.

When I looked more closely, the writer was talking about how important planning is for their work — how they compile a big document, breaking down a book into detailed chapter outlines, and how that guides the writing process. 

This is not so awful as far as advice goes, especially when it comes to non-fiction work, and probably when it comes to all writing of significant length.

However, not all writing is of significant length and not all writing is for publication. Some writing that ends up being published does not originate from such highly considered, rationalised methods of production. 

There are elements of writing practice that make it particularly enjoyable — moments of surprise that result from experiment — that can emerge from a highly organised writing process.

In my experience, such moments can more often develop from approaching the blank page with little idea of what one might achieve.

If you’re happy with what you’ve written, that doesn’t mean that it is going to be a bestseller.

It just means that you’ve achieved something on its own terms, and perhaps that’s how I’d best interpret the “finish everything” advice. 

If you gain a sense of satisfaction from something that you feel is well-made, you’ll want to chase that feeling again by writing more. So, finish short things and build up from there.

At first, and perhaps always, you’re your own best audience: Impressed when you’re able to carve out something new, dissatisfied when you lazily recycle a move that you’ve pulled a thousand times before.

You’re your own first reader — the person who reads and re-reads your writing before anyone else — and, for some of your work at least, you’ll be its only reader. You need to learn to love that fact.

What impresses you in your writing might well eventually impress someone else, but you will always be the first to see your words on the page and invariably their harshest critic (often too harsh!).

As a reader and a writer, then, you need patience.

You won’t always think what you’re reading is good, but you might stick with it and find something in it that grabs you.

You can learn from what you feel doesn’t work in a book: Why did the author choose this moment in a gripping narrative to break away and provide a brief history of canned food?

Over time, your self-interest creates a critical framework which you can use to appraise your reading material. The practices of reading and writing feed into one another.

You become a reader who realises that retaining curiosity is essential, and that curiosity extends to giving writers a chance on their own terms. I know of books that don’t get going until page 200, and even then “going” is putting it a bit strongly.

Yet, something compelling has emerged in those books. If arbitrary rules sound false, then it’s simply because the reality is that writers develop in remarkably different ways — mainly because they’re individuals who are coming from a wide variety of backgrounds. They often resemble each other only in their desire to write.

Small wonder, then, that the books they produce are diverse in their forms.

It’s not so much that I object to advice (who’s against encouraging more people to read?), but when the advice tends towards impatience — it’s simply pointless.

When it becomes too forbidding (never put a pen to paper unless you know what you’re going to write), it makes the simple act of writing seem exclusive and unattainable.

The solution is to develop your own approach to reading and writing and to be careful who you listen to.

Avoid the certainties of the ignorant.