The True Wheel

When work's going well I stop talking and I stop reading. Not entirely, but generally: when your head's good, stay in your head.

I'm writing long on this one. I have to keep reminding myself that novels take longer to write than they do to read. Authors read faster than a bush fire. A lot of the work goes into what's not on the page. The underpinning has to be right but a reader can go a long way into a novel without caring about that.

Brian Eno discussed production to consumption ratios in music with Richard Williams in 1979:

"I have a theory that, as a maker you tend to put in twice as much as you need as a listener. It's the symptom of contemporary production. With the facilities that you have today, you tend to plug every hole.. You're always looking for that charge, so you put more and more in to get it. But as a listener you're much less demanding... you can take things that are much simpler, much more open, and much slower. It's often happened that I've made a piece and ended up slowing it down by as much as half. Discreet Music is an example: that's half the speed at which it was recorded."

Somewhere in the index of Platonic forms there must exist the perfect ratio of writing-to-reading hours. If the time invested in creating a work far exceeds the time it takes to decode, the text becomes a bottleneck: an obstacle to all but the most perservering -- the "important but unread" category. At the other end of the scale would be the pulps -- the real pulps, not the good ones -- that are so light that they offer no challenge and no reward.

I suspect that a prerequisite for book to be a best seller is that the narrative has to be constructed at the same speed at which a reader is prepared to unpack it. Errors and stylistic missteps are irrelevant: in fact, the clunkiness of the prose humanises the narrative. As Johnny Cash said, 'Your style is function of your limitations, more so than a function of your skills.'