Does a book ever stop being written?

Written by Aphra Jikiemi-Pearson

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Any author can tell you that, even despite months and months of editing, their book may never feel quite complete, their character’s story not over quite yet. The obvious course of action after that is to write a sequel, and another, and another until they can finally lay the story and it’s characters to rest.

This part often brings authors a sense of relief. Relief that finally, they can stop writing and embark on an entirely new story set in an entirely new universe. For readers, however, it causes a wildly different plethora of emotions. Finishing a book or series is often the hardest part, staring at the last word on the page, feeling irrevocably changed by it all. ‘The end’ marks, well, the end. It’s final, and the book can be shelved.

Every book ever published has sentences, metaphors, even entire excerpts that are interpreted differently by anyone who has ever read it. People pile their opinions into online forums, book clubs, or cramped margins. They argue and imagine the characters in entirely new settings. They can take sci-fi rebels off their home planet and place them into an alternate universe where they run a coffee shop. And who’s to stop them?

And from this discourse, something new was born. Fiction, written by fans. Nosferatucould be considered fan-fiction; it closely follows the plot of Dracula, with some old characters and some new, with differing tropes and relationships. It provides a gateway for people to write their own ending, or never end a story at all.

All these different interpretations can immortalise a book, a compound of old characters with new situations, but that can be ultimately boiled down and decanted into its purest element- the original novel. No one writing style can be replicated exactly. That is what makes each written piece so authentic and personal to the author of these alternate story lines, wherever they are, hunched over a laptop or typing furiously on their phones in a train carriage (as I am writing this article).

I’m writing school essays on books my grandmother studied in school, and although old (and this does raise the question of why new classics haven’t been found that aren’t solely written by White, Western authors) these books haven’t lost their value. In fact, as time passes, and generations of pupils pore over these books, the words inside them gain worth. The author may have finished their manuscript years ago, possibly even died, and yet value and academic insights are still being drawn from their work.

New academic approaches to literature are being uncovered every day. As a classical civilisation student, reading the Horace’s satires or Juvenal’s scathing social commentary interests and amuses me greatly. I’m lucky enough to have a brilliant teacher, and he always places emphasis on how these writers preach issues that are still relevant today. With some careful studying on the hexameter, these stories could be continued with current day issues, even though they were published long ago to amuse the Roman elite rather than a secondary school student in London.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Metamorphoses by Kafka share a name but more importantly to my question, share a similar foundation: people turning into animals or creatures. Ovid came centuries before Kafka, and parallels could possibly be drawn between the two. Even if not, the title alone preserves them both. Depending on who you are talking to, you could mention ‘Metamorphoses’ and one could think either Ovid or Kafka. My classics teacher would assume Ovid, but my literature teacher would think of Kafka first. The context with which we consume literature, and to mention my earlier point, the mere action of reading it, even only the title, will continue its story, long after publication.

In my final analysis of this question, I believe that a book never truly stops being written after publication. The last page may have been turned, and the author may cringe whenever they hear their own title, but in the minds of readers, their self made narratives are only just starting. For academics, more questions could arise than be solved by finishing the book, and so essays and investigative papers are written. Not every book becomes a penguin classic or worldwide success, but the audience doesn’t have to be large to make an impact. The human imagination can see a book and make palaces out of paragraphs, never stopping, even after the next new thing comes along.