Read Online Letters to Alice by Fay Weldon - Free Book Online

perfectly normal, thank you.
    Writing is an odd activity — other people have occupations, jobs; the writer’s life is work, and the work is the life, and there can be no holidays from it. If the pen is not working, the mind is thinking, and even as you sit and watch ET ‘the extraterrestrial’, the unconscious (collective à la Jung or personal à la Freud) ponders on. Even in sleep you are not safe: dreams pertain to life, and life to dreams, and both to work. There can be no time off, no real diversions, because wherever you go you take yourself; and no pure experience either, unsullied by contemplation, or by the writer’s habit of standing back and observing what is going on — which writers will vehemently deny they do, because it sounds passionless, and calculated, but is not. They must observe with the Martian’s eye, that of a stranger in a strange land, and marvel at this and be horrified at that, while yet knowing they are part of it, and as prone to human error as anyone. They must develop the link between the mind that thinks, and the hand that writes, until words are contemporary with thought, and even precede it: until the language, as they say, has a life of its own. Language you can allow to have this life but of the other contents of a book — characters, story, purpose — the writer must remain in control. Fear the work of a writer who says, it is my characters who lead me, they take off! They well may, but who will want to follow? It is the writer’s mind the reader wants: a controlled fantasy, very, very, rarely, the meanderings of an idle author.
    The instinct to develop the craft, given the gift, is strong. Jane Austen wrote her first book when she was fourteen. It is entitled Love and Freindship, wrongly spelt, and is very funny. She has clearly read many novels: (well, we know she had. Burney, Richardson, Sterne, Fielding — no mean novelists — and no doubt a host of lesser ones too). She mocks the convention. Her characters swoon and run mad:
What first struck our eyes — we approached — they were Edward and Augustus — Yes, dearest Marianne, they were our husbands. Sophia shrieked and fainted on the ground. I screamed and instantly ran mad. We remained thus mutually deprived of our senses some minutes and on regaining them were deprived of them again. For an Hour and a quarter did we continue in this unfortunate situation — Sophia fainting every moment and I running mad as often…
    Love and Freindship is written in the form of letters, as was Lady Susan later. It was a popular form of fiction at the time, presently to fall into disrepute, for no really good reason. Such a novel has the power of one written in the first person, and the limitations thereof divided by the number of letter-writers the author chooses to involve. A direct authorial voice has to be done without, but the point of view can be from more than a single character. It is not so bad a way of telling a story. To accomplish a letter-novel successfully requires a special skill, the skill of a born dramatist — the knack of moving a plot along through the mouths of the protagonists, and laying down plot detail, as it’s called, without apparently doing so: the body has to be fleshed, but the bones not allowed to show. Jane Austen, even at the age of fourteen, could do these things wonderfully well. The pattern of her storytelling is the same as TV dramatists use today; each letter a new scene, to move the action on, each taking a different viewpoint. Her own animation, her own pleasure in her own skill, shines through the text. She must have found great pleasure in writing Love and Freindship, and greater satisfaction in finishing it. The inner excitement, when a writer realizes for the first time that this whole new world of invention and meaning lies waiting to be explored, is intense and overwhelming and exhilarating. It is like falling in love. The feeling of being singled out, of suddenly discovering that you