I finally finished RIVALS on Monday. It took me nearly a month to read. Why so slow? Because it’s 700 pages long, and also because I haven’t had a lot of reading time, and also because I sometimes felt too embarrassed to whip it out and read it on public transport, which is obviously a crucial place to do reading.
Despite the embarrassment, however, I feel it’s important to write a further blogpost about RIVALS because it, like me, you’re an aspiring writer of fiction, with literary tastes, you might think that RIVALS is not worth your precious not-in-transit reading time. It’s important that you know, my dear fellow kind of snobbish fellow aspiring writer of fiction, that Jilly Cooper is the boss of plot. I’m sure I’m not the first person to get this — no doubt many of the people who have bought her books by the millions realised this a long time ago. But for me, it was a revelation.
Drawing on my experience reading slush piles and indeed also in reading books for review, I can testify that people who can write beautiful sentences are a dime a dozen compared to people who can propel a plot, maintaining momentum and keeping track of all of the characters (in the case of RIVALS, that’s about fifty people, give or take). In other words, Jilly Cooper probably has something to teach you if you want to write fiction. Even if you feel inclined to bring a brown-paper wrapper to disguise the cover when you’re on public transport.
