Jane Cable admits to sometimes having a slightly uneasy relationship with other writers’ books
Writers are by our very nature readers. We tend to have fallen in love with stories at an early age and as children at least devoured every book we could lay our hands on or persuade someone to read to us. We disappeared into the magic of lives so very different to our own, travelling time and the globe with the carelessness of youth. Except that I was terrified of swings for a long time after reading What Katy Did.
I suppose it is no surprise that one of the first characters I can remember really relating to was Jo in Little Women. When Amy burnt her story I felt real anger and cried bitter tears. I guess I was already sucking my own pencil and waiting for the words to come.
From teenage years onwards real life started to intervene in my bookish world. In sixth form I still bought a paperback every week with the money I earned from my Saturday job at BHS and wherever I moved to for college and in early working years the first thing I did was join the local library. But as life became busier time to read became increasingly rare and I relished holidays where in pre-Kindle days my husband and I would almost literally pack a case full of books.
In my forties I started writing my first story which turned into a full length novel and here the dilemmas began. First, there was time: I really didn’t have enough to read and to write. Secondly was the fact that my head was so full of my characters there just wasn’t room for anyone else’s.
Now most writers read voraciously (apparently) and certainly everyone tells you that as a writer you should, but I have to admit to struggling. While I am living and breathing my story, how can I do anyone else’s justice? I suppose I never could read more than one book at once and it used to completely do my head in that my mother always used to have two on the go; one upstairs for light relief and nodding off to sleep with and another, normally something a little more demanding, by her chair in the living room.
So reading has been pushed to the margins of my life, to the rare times when I’m not working on anything new. An advantage of this is that the great books, such as The Time Traveler’s Wife, really stand out. This one in particular opened new doors creatively speaking because it showed me that if your characters were strong enough you could take your readers anywhere. As a writer, it made me brave and I do wonder what else I would learn if I had more bandwidth to read.
I’m also aware of the need to read successful authors in my genre and books which break out of the ordinary and get talked about. Then there’s the guilt-induced consumption of books by authors you know and feel you should review. So is reading purely for pleasure a thing of the past for me?
Thankfully, no. I have learnt to be incredibly selective and not to finish a book if I’m not enjoying it. There is a difference between books I read for research and books I read for pure joy. And in the last few weeks I actually became very excited about the launch of a new novel for the first time in years. But more about that anon, because Su Bristow’s Sealskin deserves an article all of its own.
