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6 April 2021
Dear Write Night Family,
Snow? After Easter? At this stage, why not. On the growing list of surprising, inconvenient, and terrible things happening in 2021 (COVID waves, global shipping standstills, riots…) the cold shock of flurries outside my window ranks low in comparison but it is still strange and unusual. As I summon up Radiohead’s ‘No Surprises’ vibe for the rest of April, I am thinking this week about the power of those popular predictable stories: the light reads, the page turners that are not too disturbing, the breezy romantic serials.
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"Normality returned. Tea! Blessed ordinary everyday afternoon tea!"
- from And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
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When it comes to my own taste in literary comfort food, I do look for new reads, I try, I really do. But I usually end up returning to the familiar characters and authors that got me hooked on reading in the first place. In my teenage spy thriller phase, I was burning through John Le Carre’s dark and moody Cold War dramas, the cartoonishly action-packed Jack Higgins series featuring the indefatigable Belfast-born ex-IRA assassin, Sean Dillon, and any book at the grocery store that had Tom Clancy and a submarine or a missile on the jacket cover.
(Photo: Tom Clancy on a US Naval warship)
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“I don't believe for one moment you can write well what you wouldn't read for pleasure.”
– Nora Roberts, from A Conversation with Nora Roberts (1998)
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Thanks to Higgins I first discovered the word Bushmills and, in my preteen (and pre-Google) life in the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland I always imagined Bushmills was frothy, dessert-like, a creamy and voluptuous milkshake perhaps. Why else would Sean Dillon be drinking it constantly? And thanks to the George Smiley series, I got my first dose of metonymy when I discovered what ‘coming out of the cold’ meant. So, I did not 'get' everything about the books when I read them, but I was exposed to a different language and transported to new places with familiar faces, and that, I think, kept me reading.
(Photo: Jack Higgins in aviators)
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“A story-book hero had by definition no place in life; he battered his way through twenty victorious chapters, faded out on a lustful kiss, and was gone for good.”
― Mary (Queen of Plots) Stewart, who popularized the romantic suspense novel.
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These were the one-way books I had read on the six-hour drive to my grandparents house, the books I would buy at the airport before boarding the plane and accidentally leave in the seat pocket. I hate to use the word ‘disposable’, because this was and is still a memorable part of my reading life and these light reads work my imagination just as well as some rare conceptual and dense work of literary fiction.
In a 1998 interview the best-selling novelist Nora Roberts notes that even though there is a formula to her trademark ‘category romance’ novel that "Category has offered me a wonderful canvas on which to paint -- they might be quick, charcoal sketches rather than the more detailed or sweeping oils I do outside of category. But art is still art.”
Roberts, arguably the most successful workhorse of the romance/mystery/suspense novel has been churning out 5-10 titles a year since her debut in 1981 has sold over 500 million copies of her books. For over 40 years her work continues to meet her readers expectations and that seems to be key to her unbridled commercial success.
(Photo: Nora Roberts)
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These days it is easy to relate to the deep satisfaction in seeing a particular narrative arc run its course. Predicting characters’ emotions, reactions, and motivation, and receiving all of that as advertised or packaged in a way that is immensely better than one expected. For Roberts to be balancing those dimensions of building entertaining stories for a wide readership AND replicating that feeling over and over in 220 full-length books (and counting) is a mind-boggling achievement. I imagine for the self-prescribed ‘Noraholics’ who adore their author, the Nora Roberts novel must tap into a more universal interest in love, surprise and reliability. Playing to those elements across forty years, in their various renditions, some stories get repetitive, some take flight, but the steady act of exploring and the production itself seems as vital as the stories Roberts creates.
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“There are 88 keys on a piano. Think of the different music made from them.”
- Nora Roberts
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Happy Reading. Happy Writing.
Take Care,
Andrew
Write Night Host, Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's
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This project is just one of the ways we are attempting to mitigate isolation and anxiety amongst our students and staff during the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is generously supported by the Queen's Annual Fund. Find out more about the wider project here.
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