I'm a writer - now, let me entertain you

Increasingly authors are forced to choose: treat writing as a performance or face an uncertain future

There comes a moment in the life of all but the most saintly authors when, suddenly and uncomfortably, he is introduced to his inner Kingsley Amis, or she to her inner Germaine Greer. For years, they have smiled back at heartless publishers, tactless booksellers, gormless members of the public, but then something happens to make them snap.

Under normal circumstances, I am able to keep my inner Kingers in check but recently he emerged, eyes metaphorically bulging, veins figuratively throbbing in the neck and temples. I had been contacted out of the blue with an offer that seemed, at first glance, perfectly reasonable. A library was putting on a family fun day one Saturday. The idea was to prove to Mum, Dad and the kids that libraries can be lively, vibrant places. There would a talk, craft displays and, they very much hoped, an author would be on hand to read and chat to adults and children.

It was not the fun, the family or the library that irritated me but the conflation of all three into one event. I imagined family groups drifting in, curious, on the lookout for freebie handouts, needing to rest their legs after the weekly shop. They would drift past the craft show and the demonstration and look with mild embarrassment at the figure seated beside a pile of his own books. There might be some awkward chat; if there were any readings, they would have to be brief and zany, full of family fun. Harmless in their way, these initiatives betray a fear that most normal, ordinary people will belong to the Tim Henman school of culture and will assume that books are boring. Reading has become such a weird hardcore activity that punters must be lured into opening a book by some slick salesman of an author. Indeed - if one is to go by an exhibition now touring the country - the books themselves may eventually become redundant altogether.

The Library of Unwritten Books, currently available at the Aspex Gallery in Portsmouth, offers us all the chance to read ideas from hundreds of people who have all that it takes to be an author except the time to get their story down in words. Having travelled the country with a tape-recorder, the organisers now have a library of very brief synopses. One story tells of a man who went to Austria before the war, another of someone whose life was changed by a conversation in a pub. On the visual side, there are illustrations which accompany a story, as yet unwritten, about a family of conkers. One contribution, according to a BBC report, "has all the hallmarks of a bestseller".

It is easy to mock the idea that a project be a potential bestseller when only a few phrases of it exist, but publishers have been working on this principle for years. As any moderately shrewd literary agent knows, it is often true that the fewer words that an author puts to paper before a deal, the greater the chance of acceptance. In a world where the most successful projects can be summarised with a snappy soundbite, too much text can merely confuse matters. So, at every turn, the division between the writer and the written becomes greater. A library's family fun day is about everything except books. A novelist who sits down and completes a work that fails to lend itself to a snappy line of selling copy is in danger of being regarded as hopelessly naïve. Increasingly, writers are faced with the choice: join the game and treat writing as a sort of performance or face an uncertain future as that sad, old-fashioned type, the author who believes that his book should speak for itself.

The more bumbling poets occasionally have the opportunity to stay in the background as, increasingly, actors are hired to declaim on their behalf but, as Christina Patterson recently revealed in The Independent, the result is often mawkish and embarrassing.

Another approach is to goose up readings by aggressive and naked exhibitionism. In New York, something of a trendsetter when it comes to funky, interactive literary occasions, authors are competitively zany when they tout their latest works around town. One leads the audience in a singalong. Another hands out diagrams based on his own balding pattern. A third took to interspersing stories with a few licks on a guitar, which he later demolished. These kinds of display have apparently gone a long way to overcoming the Henman factor. "I'd imagined readings as boring events with guys in ties," one member of the audience told The New York Times. The show he had just seen, which had used a DJ and a turntable, changed all that. An organiser of readings explained that performance was "part of a culture of personality, where the human behind the work is deemed as significant as the work itself".

There is another view: that the greater the gap between books and authors, the less people actually read. The guitar-smasher discovered to his astonishment that people were more interested in watching him destroying an instrument than in anything he had written. He was beginning to feel like a court jester and has returned to reading without accompaniment. So the idea is now free for any library needing to liven up their family fun day.

terblacker@aol.com