After reading the manuscript, my friends and editors suggested I abbreviate the first hundred pages, which they found very difficult and demanding. Without thinking twice, I refused, because, as I insisted, if somebody wanted to enter the abbey and live there for seven days, he had to accept the abbey’s own pace. If he could not, he would never manage to read the whole book. Therefore those first hundred pages are like a penance or an initiation, and if someone does not like them, so much the worse for him. He can stay at the foot of the hill.
Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains - you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise, you stop right away. Some novels breathe like gazelles, others like whales or elephants. Harmony lies not in the length of the breath but in its regularity. And if, at a certain point (but this should not occur too often), the breathing breaks off and a chapter (or a sequence) ends before the breath is completely drawn, this irregularity can play an important role in the economy of the story; it can mark a turning point, a surprise development.
Rhythm, pace, penitence… . For whom? For me? No, certainly not. For the reader. While you write, you are thinking of a reader, as the painter, while he paints, is thinking of the viewer who will look at the picture. After making a brush stroke, he takes two or three steps back and studies the effect - he looks at the picture, that is, the way the viewer will admire it, in proper lighting, when it is hanging on a wall.
What does it mean, to imagine a reader able to overcome the penitential obstacle of the first hundred pages? It means, precisely, writing a hundred pages for the purpose of constructing a reader suitable for what comes afterward.
HOW I WROTE ‘THE NAME OF THE ROSE’ by Umberto Eco
