Read Online The well of lost plots by Jasper Fforde - Free Book Online

long, though — Text Grand Central want to upgrade the system.”
    “Someone mentioned Ultra Word™ on the news last night,” I observed.
    “Fancy-pants name. It’s BOOK V9 to me and you. WordMaster Libris should be giving us a presentation shortly. UltraWord™ is being tested as we speak — if it’s as good as they say it is, books will never be the same again!”
    “Well,” I sighed, trying to get my head around this idea, “I had always thought novels were just, well,
written
.”
    “
Write
is only the word we use to describe the recording process,” replied Snell as we walked along. “The Well of Lost Plots is where we interface the writer’s imagination with the characters and plots so that it will make sense in the reader’s mind. After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer’s breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer — perhaps more.”
    This was a new approach; I mulled the idea around in my head.
    “Really?” I replied, slightly doubtfully.
    “Of course!” Snell laughed. “
Surf pounding the shingle
wouldn’t mean diddly unless you’d seen the waves cascade onto the foreshore, or felt the breakers tremble the beach beneath your feet, now would it?”
    “I suppose not.”
    “Books” — Snell smiled — “are a kind of magic.”
    I thought about this for a moment and looked around at the chaotic fiction factory. My husband
was
or
is
a novelist — I had always wanted to know what went on inside his head, and this, I figured, was about the nearest I’d ever get. 3 We walked on, past a shop called A Minute Passed. It sold descriptive devices for marking the passage of time — this week they had a special on seasonal changes.
    “What happens to the books which are unpublished?” I asked, wondering whether the characters in
Caversham Heights
really had so much to worry about.
    “The failure rate is pretty high,” admitted Snell, “and not just for reasons of dubious merit.
Bunyan’s Bootscraper
by John McSquurd is one of the best books ever written, but it’s never been out of the author’s hands. Most of the dross, rejects or otherwise unpublished just languish down here in the Well until they are broken up for salvage. Others are so bad they are just demolished — the words are pulled from the pages and tossed into the Text Sea.”
    “All the characters are just recycled like waste cardboard or something?”
    Snell paused and coughed politely. “I shouldn’t waste too much sympathy on the one-dimensionals, Thursday. You’ll run yourself ragged and there really isn’t the time or resources to recharacterize them into anything more interesting.”
    “Mr. Snell, sir?”
    It was a young man in an expensive suit, and he carried what looked like a very stained pillowcase with something heavy in it about the size of a melon.
    “Hello, Alfred!” said Snell, shaking the man’s hand. “Thursday, this is Garcia — he has been supplying the Perkins and Snell series of books with intriguing plot devices for over ten years. Remember the unidentified torso found floating in the Humber in
Dead Among the Living
? Or the twenty-year-old corpse discovered with the bag of money bricked up in the spare room in
Requiem for a Safecracker
?”
    “Of course!” I said, shaking the technician’s hand. “Good, intriguing page-turning stuff. How do you do?”
    “Well, thank you,” replied Garcia, turning back to Snell after smiling politely. “I understand the next Perkins and Snell novel is in the pipeline and I have a little something that might interest you.”
    He held the bag open and we looked inside. It was a head. Or more importantly, a
severed
head.
    “A head in a bag?” queried Snell with a frown, looking closer.
    “Indeed,” murmured Garcia proudly,