At Goldsmiths last week, Ian McEwan was reading from his work in progress, which is so much in progress that it has yet to acquire a title. (Mind you, in my case that can be any time before the proofs go out...) We all felt a little thrilled, and settled back to listen, and it didn't disappoint. During the questions he was asked if reading unpublished work was different from the more usual business of reading from newly-published novels, and he said it was. Reading aloud when working on something is about 'breathing the sentences, which is mostly about punctuation' he said, and he does it a lot as part of a day's writing. But it's different when he reads work in progress publicly, too, because it's 'not just performing', as it is when the book's published: it's part of the work on it.
I don't think he meant simply that he might change things after such a reading (though he had a nice story of looking up and realising that his Hay Festival audience, who were mostly d'un certain age, would be the perfect source of advice for the as-yet-unnamed plants growing between the paving stones of the terrace in Atonement). Because publishing a novel, for all practical purposes, means the end of working on it, it's an oddity of the writing life that the rest of the world becomes aware of your engagement with a book about a year after you cease to be truly engaged with it. Engaged in the sense that a set of gears are engaged with each other, that is: intimately, complicatedly, so closely that no one part can move without the others moving too.
So when you read published work, it is in a way like performing a script someone else has written: not creating, but transmitting something which is not (is no longer) part of you. Whereas when you read work in progress, even if it's not in a context like a workshop which is explicitly about opening the work to others to discuss changing it, there's still a underlying sense that this is provisional, uncertain, unstable, a moment of stock-taking on a journey whose direction and distance are yet unknown: work 'in progress' indeed. However distinguished the speaker, however formal the lecture hall, however worshipful most of the audience, these words so funny and cynical and beautifully read are not final words: they're still on the move.
