Читать книгу With Child - Andy Martin - Страница 8

Andy Martin’s extraordinary Reacher Said Nothing was a day-to-day account of the writing of my twentieth novel, Make Me. The idea was he should witness the first word, the last, and everything in between, and he did. Job done. But naturally we stayed in touch afterward, and he joined me for some of the launch events, six months after that last word was recorded. It seemed only fair – he had witnessed the long gestation, and he wanted to see the birth. Which meant he saw the book’s early reception, and heard from its early readers.

Which led to another idea. We had talked a lot over the previous year, about the minutest minutiae of sentence construction, punctuation, word choice, and so on, but also about larger issues, one of which was my firm belief that writing and reading is a two-way street. First a book is written, then it is read, and only then does it exist. Readers create the story in their own heads, literally, at that point expending their own mental energy, burning their own calories. We agreed that the reader’s sense of what the book is about is just as determinative as the writer’s.

Andy was talking to the readers, listening to them, hearing their opinions. It struck both of us that Reacher Said Nothing was only half the story – the writer’s half. We felt the readers’ half should be recorded too. Hence this new addition. It completes the circle, and it tells me what the book I wrote is really about.

Lee Child

New York

2018