Extractions

[shewhomust]

kateelliott asked last summer - as she was about to embark on a book tour, I think - what sort of readings people liked to hear. I thought that was an interesting question - although, looking back at her post, I realise that I was partly spinning off at a tangent from what she asked, onto a topic which I had already been thinking about. It's one of the many questions on which desperance and I disagree constantly, volubly and at length. Which is why I'm back on the topic now: River of the World, desperance's new book is about to be published, and it's time to put an extract on the web site, as a taster. But how do I choose my extract?

desperance (and I hope I'm doing justice to his argument) would say it's obvious, you begin at the beginning, that's where the book starts. It's the part of the book least able to let slip information which should come as a surprise (though this isn't necessarily the case for River of the World, which is the second volume of the sequence - how far are we obliged to protect the sensibilities of people who read extracts from sequels to books they have not yet read?). And he writes a fine opening, too, his first lines are teasers that hook you into the story and earworm your imagination.

Yet when I'm looking for an extract, I tend to avoid the start of the book. For what it's worth, when I'm loooking at a book in a bookshop or library, I don't look at the beginning; I open it about halfway through. It isn't a problem that I don't know what's going on, or who these people are: the question is, does what I'm reading make me want to know? Alice de Smith, reading at yesterday's awards ceremony, claimed to be reading from the beginning of her novel-in-progress because she was too lazy to put together the explanations that would be required if she read from later in the book; Andy Croft - after a two-sentence summary - read us the sex scene from his novel-in-sonnets. If I leave a reading wanting to know more, that's a good thing, not a bad one; it makes it more likely I'll buy the book to find out. That goes for wanting to know what happened previously, as well as what happens next.

An extract needs to pull the reader into the story, but it also needs to stand alone, to have some sort of completeness. Stopping on a cliff-hanger may provoke an immediate "what happens next?" response, but it works against the sense of having been given something with its own unity, something small but perfectly formed. I suspect that this is more difficult to achieve, too, at the beginning of the book, which is more likely to be moving constantly forward, not letting up until the reader is well and truly committed.

One last reason why I prefer not to take the very start of the book as an extract: if I've already read or heard the opening pages as an extract, and decide on the strength of that to read the book, then when I pick the book up to do that, I find myself reading something I've read before. Am I the only person who hates the publisher's trick of including the first chapter of the next book at the end of the one I've just finished? If reading a whole book by an author hasn't persuaded me that I want to read the next one, an extra chapter isn't going to do the trick! And if I do want to read the next book, I don't want to read the first chaper now, suffer all the impatience of waiting until I can get chapter 2, and then either skip or re-read... No, I don't see the point of it. So, as I was saying, I'd rather pick up a book and read an opening I haven't read before, and gain some context so that by the time I reach the extract I know, I'm reading it in a whole different light, and it seems fresh and new.

That's the theory; here's the practical application. This is the extract I chose from River of the World: I'd be grateful to anyone who has time to read it, and can tell me whether it works.