Climbing the Giants' shoulders: N M Browne

 

Recently someone asked what books I would recommend to someone intending to write fiction. I am a little ashamed to confess that I never read anything about writing before I started writing - it never occurred to me to do so. Looking back that seems both stupid and perverse and also entirely in character. 

There is an awful lot to be said for standing on the shoulders of giants, but all my life I have specialised in grubbing around in the shadows at their feet  messing up and making do, attempting to reinvent the wheel by trial and error. I know this isn't an intelligent approach. I've never learned to cook either in spite of the fact that I do a lot of it. I hate following recipes so my cooking is hit or miss and not infrequently a bit of both in a curate's egg kind of way. I am at a loss to explain this idiocy even to myself. I could have saved so much time and my family so many terrible culinary experiences if only I'd taken the time to master a couple of basic techniques. I know this and yet here I am still failing to take lessons, still blundering on.

I learned to write by reading, which makes a lot more sense than learning to cook by eating but is, I think, a little bit the same. I know what effect I want to create and then mash words together until I cook up something with  roughly the right flavour (don't worry I am not going to push this metaphor any further.) 

I wonder if I'd set out to approach writing in a more sensible way I might have been frightened off. I wonder if I'd have found the task too difficult and daunting because the only thing I can say in defence of my method is that it is impossible to get wrong: when you don't know the right way of doing things there is no wrong way. I think my whole failure to engage with other people's advice is part of a largely unconscious  effort to con my psyche into believing that novel writing is such a natural, easy process that no special skill or knowledge is necessary.

My own methodology that emerged through trial and error sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. If you are interested I explain it here, here and here

Perhaps now I have had some experience I could dare to read a book about writing without being scared off. I am finally considering learning how to cook - a momentous shift in attitude.  So, if you have any good suggestions I am eager to clamber up onto the shoulders of giants and not a moment too soon. What books would you recommend?