I started a new short story. I was happy with where I reached but had to put it to one side thanks to busy times at work. I was ready to come back to it this past weekend, but my normal equilibrium took a knock from the disaster of the Brexit vote. Such energies as I wanted to expend on writing went into blog posts elsewhere.
Never mind, I thought, I have quite a pile of new and recent novels sitting on my "to read" shelf, and I selected one I thought might be diverting for a day or two.
It is by an author whose work first caught my eye in 2006. Since then I have pre-ordered their work and caught up on their back-catalogue. They've built a decent audience over the last decade and can be regarded, I think, as a successful writer.
Three novels ago, for the first time I abandoned one of their novels. I found it boring: some interesting ideas but, as a story, dull. Well, I thought, lots of people are praising it so I guess it's just one of those things: you can't like everything a writer writes.
Their next book was something of a return to form. I enjoyed it right up until the point, near the end, where the author committed a fairly egregious breach of the fourth wall. This is not unknown in fiction of course, leading the reader to question who the narrator/POV voice really is, causing you to reconsider what you think you're reading. But this was just cack-handed authorial intervention, and I wondered how the editor had let it go by.
And now their most recent novel. I am on page 29 and already thinking of abandoning it. The writing is, in my opinion, poor, with the same authorial interruptions in the narrative and none of the verve or skill in execution that characterised the best of their earlier work.
Is it just me? Lots of people seem to think it is great--they must do: the author repeatedly retweets reader praise for it.
Since I started writing with some degree of seriousness, I have stopped posting reviews of novels on Amazon and have gone to some lengths not to identify the author to whom the above relates. Who it is doesn't really matter. My point is that I suspect if I, as an unknown, were to submit this novel as a manuscript, I would be told, correctly, to go away and not come back until it was a lot better.
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Added: notwithstanding the 5* reviews on Amazon, I couldn't get myself past p.29.
Wednesday, 29 June 2016
Monday, 13 June 2016
Time passages
Since my last, I sent all of the drafts of the recent stories to an editor for a proper assessment and edit. I was surprised when the report came back very positive and with only minor textual infelicities picked up.
When I say "surprised" I don't mean to be excessively self-deprecating: I was genuinely surprised that an objective reader coming to them for the first time didn't raise more queries. They are now undergoing a closer line-edit, so we'll see what comes out of that.
In the meantime, I have been working up ideas for a novel in the same world and am content with how this process is going. I've also been toying with a short story in a completely different context: once I have a more detailed idea of how that goes I'll write it--researching and plotting is fine, but I need the practice in actual writing.
Early in this process of trying to learn to write, I read a lot of the usual self-help manuals. I didn't get a lot out of them to be honest, a lot of them seemed to be advocating a cookie-cutter approach leading to over-familiar end results. The only book that I actually found helpful was Steven King's On Writing. Most of my 'education' came from considering authors whom I like and trying to work out why I like them and what I could use. So I like Muriel Spark's concision and acidity; George Mackay Brown's masking of subtlety within simple prose; Christopher Priest's unflashy intelligence; Dorothy Dunnett's focus; and M John Harrison's obliqueness and refusal to conform.
This weekend I have been reading James Wood's How Fiction Works, and it has been the right book at the right time for me as I consider how to develop ideas. A couple of years ago I probably wouldn't have engaged with it so well, a couple years more and it would be too late for me :-)
When I say "surprised" I don't mean to be excessively self-deprecating: I was genuinely surprised that an objective reader coming to them for the first time didn't raise more queries. They are now undergoing a closer line-edit, so we'll see what comes out of that.
In the meantime, I have been working up ideas for a novel in the same world and am content with how this process is going. I've also been toying with a short story in a completely different context: once I have a more detailed idea of how that goes I'll write it--researching and plotting is fine, but I need the practice in actual writing.
Early in this process of trying to learn to write, I read a lot of the usual self-help manuals. I didn't get a lot out of them to be honest, a lot of them seemed to be advocating a cookie-cutter approach leading to over-familiar end results. The only book that I actually found helpful was Steven King's On Writing. Most of my 'education' came from considering authors whom I like and trying to work out why I like them and what I could use. So I like Muriel Spark's concision and acidity; George Mackay Brown's masking of subtlety within simple prose; Christopher Priest's unflashy intelligence; Dorothy Dunnett's focus; and M John Harrison's obliqueness and refusal to conform.
This weekend I have been reading James Wood's How Fiction Works, and it has been the right book at the right time for me as I consider how to develop ideas. A couple of years ago I probably wouldn't have engaged with it so well, a couple years more and it would be too late for me :-)
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