Authors Electric

My A level English teacher once began a lesson with a challenge: ‘Why should people read novels?’    Easy, we thought. ‘To find out about the world.’    ‘Say I’m someone who works in an office, a bank, a business. I have my newspaper for that.’ Who needs books? Photo by James Abbott from FreeImages    ‘To find out about people, then; what makes them tick.’ ‘Feelings and emotions.’ ‘See what it’s like to go through something you haven’t experienced yourself.’    All of these answers – perfectly reasonable, we thought – he batted back like flies. ‘People! I know all about them, believe me. Work with people every day. What can a story someone has made up, all about characters they’ve also made up, tell me about life? That stuff’s just for kids. Pure entertainment. I don’t need to escape into fairy stories, thank you.’    It was a wind-up, of course. Boris, as we called him (I have no idea why – it wasn’t his nam...

I'm not going to pretend that writers can change the world. There are very few books that have had a monumental impact on thinking - the works of Marx excepted, and maybe Plato, and Rousseau, and Thomas Paine ... I'm not going to destroy my argument by listing philosophers. Besides, I'm not thinking of them - but of the majority of us who tap away at our computers, teasing out stories from the general confusion of our ideas, and sending them out for some to read. They aren't earth-shattering; few will be remembered when we're gone. Even so, I would argue that writing, even apparently trivial little stories, can contribute to big ideas and ways of looking at the world. For in the reading we employ our skills of curiosity, and of empathy - with characters, with the problems that face them in the contexts of their challenging settings. Imagine our reader, sitting up in bed, a partner ready to turn out the light, and yet she must read one more page, one more pag...