Jason Howell's Blog - Posts Tagged "mainstream-fiction"
Smart vs. Accessible
Have you ever worried about your work not being "literary" or "smart" enough? What about "marketable" or "accessible" enough?
Are these necessary concerns or do you find them stifling? When concepts like "literary prowess" or "market appeal" start closing in, how do you work around or through them?
________________________________________
Eugenio Negro:
Yeah oddly enough I have gone through this cycle. Normally I can be really, let's say, novelistic, hewing to the possibilities and liberties enshrined by romantic, naturalistic and modernistic writing, letting the characters and the feeling carry the story. With a much longer piece I've been working on, however, I've been polluted by the bullshit Hollywood brainwashing that there should be some kind of action sequence that delivers a consequence or result for the characters; that's to say, I've felt like I needed to do something "external," i.e., accessible, and not "internal" or character-driven. It's stopped me in my tracks twice and caused a lot of wheel-spinning that really just prevented me from seeing what I already had to use from previous sections of the piece.
Never had any problems with being literary or smart enough, rather the opposite. Lately I'm working hard on getting jokes and outrageous dialogue (harvested from real people, of course) into my stories so there's some low art. And besides, who am I to say what's literary and smart? Those who ask themselves this are colonizing themselves and their audience. You have to be authentic.
So how to work through it? There has to be a point where you've got your themes and what you want to do written down somewhere, and when these concepts get in the way you just refocus on what you HAVE to tell the world. Get the story told. If you can find places to be "accessible" and find a marketable hook in revision and rewrites, that's great. If not, oh well.
Lissa Johnston:
I have to admit I have not worried about being literary or smart enough until now that you have mentioned - thanks for that! Seriously though, with my initial books being non-fiction and my grad school training in research methods, those were not concerns. That's not to say they won't be in the future when I will be writing in different genres...
read more: http://www.howlarium.com/
Are these necessary concerns or do you find them stifling? When concepts like "literary prowess" or "market appeal" start closing in, how do you work around or through them?
________________________________________
Eugenio Negro:
Yeah oddly enough I have gone through this cycle. Normally I can be really, let's say, novelistic, hewing to the possibilities and liberties enshrined by romantic, naturalistic and modernistic writing, letting the characters and the feeling carry the story. With a much longer piece I've been working on, however, I've been polluted by the bullshit Hollywood brainwashing that there should be some kind of action sequence that delivers a consequence or result for the characters; that's to say, I've felt like I needed to do something "external," i.e., accessible, and not "internal" or character-driven. It's stopped me in my tracks twice and caused a lot of wheel-spinning that really just prevented me from seeing what I already had to use from previous sections of the piece.
Never had any problems with being literary or smart enough, rather the opposite. Lately I'm working hard on getting jokes and outrageous dialogue (harvested from real people, of course) into my stories so there's some low art. And besides, who am I to say what's literary and smart? Those who ask themselves this are colonizing themselves and their audience. You have to be authentic.
So how to work through it? There has to be a point where you've got your themes and what you want to do written down somewhere, and when these concepts get in the way you just refocus on what you HAVE to tell the world. Get the story told. If you can find places to be "accessible" and find a marketable hook in revision and rewrites, that's great. If not, oh well.
Lissa Johnston:
I have to admit I have not worried about being literary or smart enough until now that you have mentioned - thanks for that! Seriously though, with my initial books being non-fiction and my grad school training in research methods, those were not concerns. That's not to say they won't be in the future when I will be writing in different genres...
read more: http://www.howlarium.com/
