Book cover with title and author and narrow street view of walking person

Ronnie O’Sullivan’s 2016 novel, Framed.

I’m not sure I’ll read Ronnie O’Sullivan’s novel. I might. I didn’t read his autobiography, but I have an interest in snooker and in the plight of those who’ve reached enviable levels of excellence and struggled to cope. I may even go to it in disbelief – a novel? Rocket Ronnie. But then why not, and I warmed to his comments during the launch publicity that the fictional story, in contrast to his autobiography, had helped him better understand himself through the process.

Do we write to know ourselves or for others to know us?

There’s a heap of reasons why someone wants to write. I’ve talked to people about the mass of words that burden their heads, the way every thought seems to require a fine sentence to make it more real and manageable. Others talk of the need to get that rush of evaporating thoughts into some permanent state in order to reorder and to play. Others need the invention, the pleasure that comes with manipulating a narrative around invented characters who may or may not have the quirks and traits of our friends and enemies.

For some there’s the expectation of that warm hug of childhood memory, that our works are loved and wanted and so we are too.  It can become a need to be heard, a tool for response in the desire to be unachievably meaningful to others’ lives. There’s the ‘being read’ and that’s where it all changes.

And of course anyone who can physically write can creatively write. At the very least they can contribute meaningfully to a ghosting process, and that’s perhaps no worse that Jeff Koons directing a porcelain factory to make a model Michael Jackson. One way or another craft has a democracy about it that many find enormously irritating. While musical composition or painting or magicianship need a journey of skill enhancement before you have anything to show another human being, while stand-up comedy or juggling require  some honing and testing before you dare go before a critic, writing is one of those things – like photography perhaps – that few people want lessons in and that everyone can get an odd good random result at, even if they’re not sure why.

Writing though is the use of words, as are many of our thoughts, as is our examination of self and motive. Whether we are good with them, or great, or not so terrific, there’s a familiar urge to get words down in a form that others might take them on board. There’s a sense that the self has gone with them in some form. There’s a chance that what that self becomes is distorted by our clumsiness, our ungainly phrase, our less than perfect delivery of narrative flow. What changes when we want to write but can’t.

Kundera springs to mind as someone who has characters that want to write but can’t. There’s a whole genre there, even, from Adrian Mole through Stephen Daedalus back to Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee. Not everyone who can’t write is lucky enough to have help – or to have major companies happy to launch us as first timers. Nevertheless, those who can write do; and then they often expect an audience. And there have been many explorations of what it is to hanker to express something through fiction and to struggle with the process.

This brings an interesting question about the need to write. Some of this is of interest in the consideration of what the author might be doing when the writing is shown to another person, and how the self might be adapted or tested upon the reception.

There are a set of circumstances through which this transfer might take place, and again I’m minded of Kundera and that marvellous passage possibly in Laughter and Forgetting where he talks of a desire to be seen by unseen eyes. Here’s a quick set of thoughts that someone else has probably done as a research project but strike me as important to revisit.

Types of audience for writers

  • The author reads their writing aloud.
  • The author has the writing read in their presence.
  • The author places the writing somewhere, knowing who will read it later
  • The author places the writing somewhere, not knowing those who will read it later, but certain that it will be read.
  • The author places the writing somewhere, not knowing whether or not it will be read later.
  • The author reads the piece themselves then destroys.
  • The author destroys the piece without reading it themselves

This seems to offer some sort of parabola, the elements in the middle are distinct in scale. Those at the beginning and end are opposites but have a distinct authorial involvement.

Also each of these allows one of at least two distinct versions, those being whether or not the author is identifying themselves before hand as the author. This may then grow to a veritable hall of mirrors of possible versions, with authors announcing known or unknown versions of themselves, or any number of variables on the false author possibility from a simple pseudonym to an elaborate additional authorial being.

Back to the simple list above. The first two give some direct feedback and have a relationship with performance acts and the multiplicity of creative interplay between performer and audience. This is not normally the preference of an author, though. It is unusual in traditional written fiction and more familiar to publicity tours or fully-performative events for which a piece is specially written.

Many writers would harbour an ambition to be in at number four on the list. An audience that is guaranteed but unknown to us. As amateurs we are most regularly in at number five – like some am-dram Waiting for Godot, our hoped for audience may never come.

There are nuances of the exposed self in each one of these. Do we know the reader of our work, do we know their type or how they will make their judgements? Are we inviting this scrutiny from a predicted reader? How does that condition us and what does it make of self when we write for them?

Stories are legend of those whose readership has passed outside the one they had hoped for or predicted. It’s hard to say ‘poor’ JK Rowling without a snigger, but, if for a moment we have some sympathy, there was an author who created a quite wonderful saga for 7-11 year olds, replete with the many tried and tested literary elements for the age group. Suddenly however, global fame means that it’s being read by those who are rather older, and criticised for what it is or isn’t or, worse, what it should or shouldn’t be. (I’ve heard literary critics moan about everything from unrounded stage baddies in the series, to the lack of a coherent principle of physics.)  JK is famous for keeping her private life as private as possible and has said that, through publication, she expected to stay unnoticed in the background while the book and the characters became famous. Hard cheese, JK, hearts are bleeding.

That’s quite an interesting notion of what a book does for an author, and one that many would perhaps recognise. Our book is what has become famous. Our book is looked at, examined and tested against the rights and wrongs, the excellencies and deplorabilities of the world’s expectations. And – by chance – we, the author are not.

It’s not true of everyone and there are plenty of flamboyant, extrovert characters in the pantheon of literary high-achievers. They don’t seem to be the norm, though. Salinger and Harper Lee may be examples of those who rebuffed journalistic approaches and were characterised as reclusive and perhaps they are good examples of authors who actively feared the fame that their books had achieved and the scrutiny that they themselves were then under.

It may not be too wide of the mark to say that those who gravitate towards writing are seeking something of this possibility around the written word. Writing becomes us, (it goes with our hair…ba-boom!). It does though, we momentarily become our writing, but then it passes from us, never to grow old in itself but to find new life in other minds.

There’s a common trope of the aging painter collecting their early works around them. Collected works perhaps provide a literary equivalent. Here is a chance to assess, to see what we sent out into the world and get a sense of how those representatives fared without us. A chance to reflect how much of self was in them, to see if we still recognise what is there and to see if we can welcome them home without shame.

They are us when we want them to be. How many authors write under a pseudonym and for what reason? One reason is certainly the distance that it allows, as well as the active ‘becoming’ of some other self that it allows. How do we feel if our work is being talked about with the talker unaware that we are listening or that we are the author. Do we pounce into the conversation – well actually, you’ll be amazed to know…. Or do we stay silently proud or shamed?

Are we nervously weighing the control we have over the offer of visibility, like someone dressing to please, we tread slowly away from what is unremarkable and find our way across the see-saw ever closer to what is only too noticeable. Where is the balance and where do we feel most comfortable.

The real fear, surely, is that we will not be able to control the overbalancing rush if it comes. That others will be making the decisions. We offer up control, and, at the same time, seek vainly to retain it.

Jeanette Winterson has been very clear on many occasions that she is a fiction writer. She sees it as a misogynistic belittling of women’s writing that they are accused not to be writing fiction but instead can only write what they know, or about who they ‘really’ are. Is it that fiction is part of a more cultivated approach? In the same way that a more brilliant painter will see the world anew and paint it beyond its own reality, perhaps the fictionalist is getting at the world in a more productive, deeper way.

Autobiography is a well-examined phenomena in literature that is known to shed interesting lights on their authors that weren’t desired, predicted or acknowledged. False auto-biography is commonplace. In the case of Thomas Hardy, he released an official ‘biography’ which was later revealed to be an auto-biography.  There are a range of pseudo auto-biographies, among which are those that:

  • are openly autobiographical and read as informative and semi-objective in scope and tone
  • are openly autobiographical and acknowledging the subjective point of view and its likely limitations
  • claim to be autobiographical but admit swaying from facts (as others would likely accept them)
  • claims to be autobiographical and are consciously but covertly altered from facts others would accept
  • claim to be autobiographical and are unconsciously misrepresenting facts others would represent differently
  • are released as a fiction with disguised autobiography – possibly without full recognition of that likelihood

Is there a sliding scale here, from the desperate attempt at appealing to possible truth to the conscious attempt at falsehood? And does that scale include another parabolic feature, where the centre of the two extremes is something else, something more furtive yet literary.

There are ways for things to not be autobiographical when they emerge: a pseudonymous author, an Alice B Toklas alternative, a non-person, a fictionalised self, a mock self hyped and remedied, or just a character in and of itself alone, the simple way in which all fiction has something of the author’s life in them just as all portraits are in one way or another also self-portraits.

How might any of these identifiably contain more or less of a self that we would choose to show or hide? Or is it simply text from which the author evaporates, freed by their own Barthesque under-importance?

And which is Rocket Ronnie? Hopefully for him a happier man for his writing.