Addictive reading

Plus TikTok news – and please judge the In Writing book by its fabulous cover.

Paid subscribers can listen to me read this newsletter aloud, here or on any podcast app.

My book now officially has a cover, designed by the brilliant Anna Morrison, which I’m so thrilled about. I’ll be talking a lot more about the book over the course of this year, so today I’ll just say that I hope you like the look of it.

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I’ve recently joined TikTok to see what all the literary fuss is about, and with a view to possibly sharing some writing tips and insight with the #BookTok crowd. (I haven’t posted yet.)

I wasn’t sure about it initially, but the more I log in and find interesting accounts, the better it gets at suggesting the kind of stuff I like (yes, Hattie, it’s called an algorithm). It’s a dangerous move for me to add another social media app to my phone, because I don’t have great restraint. My name is Hattie and I’m addicted to trash entertainment. There are millions of us out there with the same disease: scrolling away on Instagram until we’re nauseous; watching 35 episodes of a reality TV show because each one ends with a ‘Next time…’ clip that’s pure heroin. At the end of a binge, we feel dazed and empty.

These products are designed to be as addictive as possible – but that’s nothing new in entertainment, or at the frontier where culture and technology meet. In the Victorian era, thanks to recent improvements in the industrial printing press, most longform fiction was serialised in monthly or weekly instalments before it ever came out in book form. I admit I haven’t read any Charles Dickens, but at school I was forced to read The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, which (maybe unfairly) put me off the genre.

The Woman in White came out bit by bit in 1859 and 1860 in Dickens’ literary magazine All the Year Round and in Harper’s Weekly; then at the end of that period, it was published as a book. What I found most irritating about it – as far as I remember, and apologies to Wilkie if I’ve got this wrong – was that at the end of every chapter, there would be a shocking cliffhanger that came out of nowhere, as though he’d just come up with it on the spot, which maybe he had. The point was to make sure that the reader went out and bought the periodical the following week or month to find out what happened next.

I realise that this is more or less what TV soap operas do, and I watched EastEnders for many years when I was younger and didn’t mind that. It really doesn’t need to be done on such a dramatic scale, however, when you only need to turn a page to start the next chapter. I also suspect that soaps have large teams and are able to plan plot lines further ahead of time, so that at least the twists and turns seem to serve some larger arc. In The Woman in White, the whole construct felt cheap and lazy to me. I want to feel confident that the writer knows the big picture from the moment I start reading. Don’t make me watch you invent the storyline on the spot because you have a deadline! Do more work before you show me! Maybe this is also why I’m dubious about improv comedy.

Nevertheless, as an adolescent in the early 1990s, I was addicted to several series of teen novels by Katherine Applegate, especially one called Making Out. I don’t know how she did it, but my memory is that there would be a new novel every month or two, and I would haunt Waterstones bookshop in Newcastle looking for it (there was no Googling for publication dates back then). I think each one probably had a bit of a cliffhanger, or maybe a few pages of preview of the next story printed at the end of the last, to keep readers hooked. I was a devoted fan, and although I don’t remember the plots, I do remember the feeling of living in those books, which was so wonderful. I can still see the locations in my mind’s eye.

Right now, I’m reading Edward St Aubyn’s series of semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels and they are bleak, funny and incredibly addictive, which is appropriate as they’re about an addict. The first book centres on a terrible event in Patrick’s childhood, and the others are really answers to the question of whether you can survive and thrive after that kind of start in life. As soon as I finished the first, Never Mind, I was desperate to get my hands on the second, Bad News, and now I can’t stop thinking about the third, fourth and fifth. Take all my money, Edward!

Benedict Cumberbatch in the 2018 Emmy-nominated TV version of Edward St Aubyn’s novels, adapted by David Nicholls (excellent)

They were published between 1992 and 2011, which puts them in line for my resolution for 2024, which was to read more classics (as I said in a newsletter about this last summer, ‘I’m defining classics extremely loosely, to encompass anything that hasn’t been actively promoted in the last few years while I’ve been working in the literary world’). I’m lucky that I am sent a lot of new and forthcoming books, and sometimes they’re irresistible – I’m about to start Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Long Island Compromise. Still, I’m really enjoying going to my shelves and pulling out books like Never Mind that I bought years ago because I really wanted to read them, but then kept getting sidetracked. (My first treat of the year was Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife, published in 2008, which I loved.)

I’ve put some of the novels mentioned here in the In Writing bookshop, along with titles by authors I’ve had on the podcast, and some of my favourite writing books. You’ll also find my very good-looking book there, available to pre-order (thank you).

I’d love to hear about any series of books that you’ve found completely addictive, and you can also tell me if you think I’m wrong, just plain wrong about Victorian serials. (I can think of a couple of subscribers who will definitely disagree with me about improv, too.)

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The next In Writing Creative Hour will be on Sunday 14 April at 5pm UK time (here’s a timezone converter in case you’re elsewhere). The following one will be at the same time on Sunday 28 April.

Good luck with your writing this week!