Calvin on twitter would either be an inveterate post-through-it-all victim of endless dunkings, or somebody who'd sworn off the site 5 years ago after a mild controversy and now writes blogs where he mentions his 'former social media addiction' regularly. I struggle to imagine him having a healthy relationship with it. Maybe most optimistically he'd be somebody content to log off and keep to himself, like Watterson, but I have my doubts.
'[H]aving fun and writing exactly what you feel needs to be written' doesn't sound easy, but it does sound like a worthwhile goal in writing fiction, and it's an interesting juxtaposition when what you feel needs to be written isn't something we'd ordinarily think of as fun. I suppose that's how you avoid making it a piece of misery tourism, or the pornography of pain. I think you've done your job here, if the aim of this blog was to sell somebody (me) on the book; I'll be sure to check it out when next I make it to a book store.
As for the "having fun" dictum, there's a larger point I will probably write about at some point about the way in which authority in fiction has changed. My hypothesis is that, prior to the last few decades, omniscient third-person narrators had the freedom to assert and simply tell us a lot. (This is still common in, say, fantasy novels.) That's a kind of distant, superior coldness that's very far from what we ask from literary fiction now. We tend to want--or the culture industry has decided we want--intimate, vulnerable access to a character, whether in first or third. We want to have the character's realness authenticated for us by the textures of the prose itself. There are a lot of ways to do this, but I think one of the less defeating approaches is to say, OK, I'm going to give the most enjoyable account of this character that I can--I'm going to have fun with it.
Anyway what I just wrote doesn't add up to much. It would need to be a lot more fleshed out to mean anything. But it's a major current in my thinking right now.
Yeah that's a fecund area, I think. Just trying to write a reply I've cycled through a lot of different ways to approach that shift - tracing major stylistic influences of the last 140 or so years could lead you to one answer (or several), whereas looking at prominent questions in criticism, or the economy of publishing (and popular workshops/MFA programs) might lead you somewhere very different. It's certainly interesting that the ghettoization of genre novels from literary ones has encompassed this question of style, so that something that feels anachronistic in 'serious' literature is still very much current in certain types of fantasy, sci-fi, and mystery novels.
Regardless, it's always pleasurable watching a talented performer - a writer, an actor, a dancer, an athlete - have fun with what they're doing. It adds something that's hard to qualify; not exactly meta, but an extra fold or layer that includes them, and their relation to you, in a significant way. Sometimes, when it's not always clear what methods remain available to you, it's important to have fun out there.
Calvin on twitter would either be an inveterate post-through-it-all victim of endless dunkings, or somebody who'd sworn off the site 5 years ago after a mild controversy and now writes blogs where he mentions his 'former social media addiction' regularly. I struggle to imagine him having a healthy relationship with it. Maybe most optimistically he'd be somebody content to log off and keep to himself, like Watterson, but I have my doubts.
'[H]aving fun and writing exactly what you feel needs to be written' doesn't sound easy, but it does sound like a worthwhile goal in writing fiction, and it's an interesting juxtaposition when what you feel needs to be written isn't something we'd ordinarily think of as fun. I suppose that's how you avoid making it a piece of misery tourism, or the pornography of pain. I think you've done your job here, if the aim of this blog was to sell somebody (me) on the book; I'll be sure to check it out when next I make it to a book store.
Great! You'll enjoy it, I bet
As for the "having fun" dictum, there's a larger point I will probably write about at some point about the way in which authority in fiction has changed. My hypothesis is that, prior to the last few decades, omniscient third-person narrators had the freedom to assert and simply tell us a lot. (This is still common in, say, fantasy novels.) That's a kind of distant, superior coldness that's very far from what we ask from literary fiction now. We tend to want--or the culture industry has decided we want--intimate, vulnerable access to a character, whether in first or third. We want to have the character's realness authenticated for us by the textures of the prose itself. There are a lot of ways to do this, but I think one of the less defeating approaches is to say, OK, I'm going to give the most enjoyable account of this character that I can--I'm going to have fun with it.
Anyway what I just wrote doesn't add up to much. It would need to be a lot more fleshed out to mean anything. But it's a major current in my thinking right now.
Yeah that's a fecund area, I think. Just trying to write a reply I've cycled through a lot of different ways to approach that shift - tracing major stylistic influences of the last 140 or so years could lead you to one answer (or several), whereas looking at prominent questions in criticism, or the economy of publishing (and popular workshops/MFA programs) might lead you somewhere very different. It's certainly interesting that the ghettoization of genre novels from literary ones has encompassed this question of style, so that something that feels anachronistic in 'serious' literature is still very much current in certain types of fantasy, sci-fi, and mystery novels.
Regardless, it's always pleasurable watching a talented performer - a writer, an actor, a dancer, an athlete - have fun with what they're doing. It adds something that's hard to qualify; not exactly meta, but an extra fold or layer that includes them, and their relation to you, in a significant way. Sometimes, when it's not always clear what methods remain available to you, it's important to have fun out there.