Read Online Reflections by Diana Wynne Jones - Free Book Online Page A

in the Stone is only a few pages shorter, and that Arthur Ransome’s series of thirteen books average 350 pages each (and, by the way, The Sword in the Stone is first in a set of four). Nevertheless, in spite of knowing this, when I came to write for adults, I found myself assuming I was writing something long . It was very exasperating. Though the finished book is actually slightly shorter than Fire and Hemlock , it carries in it, despite my best efforts, all the results and implications of this hidden assumption.
    A long book, it follows, is going to be read in bits. Therefore you have to keep reminding your readers of things, even if they do use their brains. Some adult writers trust their readers so little that if they have, say, a hero with blue eyes who comes from Mars, they call him “the man from Mars” every time they mention him, and interlard this with “the blue-eyed man from Mars,” or occasionally “the man with blue eyes.” I swore a great oath not to do this, but it hovered, and I had to fight it. Hovering over me also was the notion “This should be the first in a trilogy” (which is another way of having things read in bits), and I kept worrying that I was not only bringing the book to too definite a conclusion but that I was also obliged to set up a world in great detail in order to be able to use it again. Now, having come to my senses and started to think about these assumptions, I ask myself why. A book should conclude satisfactorily; to leave the ending for the next volume is cynical ( and annoying for readers). And as for having my world there in detail, it was when I realized that I was actually being deterred from considering the sequel by the assumption that adults have to be reminded of the plot and action of the First Book between the lines of the Second Book—this despite a host of really good ideas—that I began to feel this was absurd. When I wrote Drowned Ammet I did not feel it necessary to recapitulate Cart and Cwidder . It would have been largely irrelevant anyway. I took the usual course of those who write for children and relied on my readers having the nous to pick up the situation as they went along. So why should I assume adults are different?
    The answer seems to be: because publishers do. It was around this area that I began to run foul of the assumptions of my would-be editor as well as my own. A “long” book naturally entails various kinds of padding. Apart from the kinds I’ve already mentioned, the most obvious form of padding is description—whether of the galactic core seen from the vertiginous skin of a spaceship, or the landscape passed through on the quest. Unfortunately, descriptions are where children stop reading, unless something is being described as an essential part of the story. I agree with them. I have long ago discovered that if I know what a given scene looks like in exact detail I do not need to describe, because it comes over in the writing, in phrases and not as a set piece. But I knew the assumption was different for adults. I used my usual method, but I added a hundred percent more describing. The would-be editor objected. “Too short” and “I don’t get enough of a sense of wonder” were the phrases used. I bit back a retort to the effect, “But you should get a sense of wonder if you stop to imagine it!” Adults are different. They need me to do all that for them.
    Perhaps the difference is merely that they need me to do different things. I started writing for children at a point where all but a few children’s books were very bad and inane. So inane were they that my husband used to fall asleep, when reading aloud at bedtime to our young, after a maximum of three sentences. The resulting outcry convinced me not only that I could do better myself, but also that it was imperative to put something in the books for the benefit of adults who had to read them aloud. I