Peter Prasad's Blog: Expletives Deleted - Posts Tagged "writing-advice"
Genius: What's wrong with novels today.
Gulp. I’ve just surfaced from two months of 2,500-word days completing my next wine and cheese crime thriller, Gurl-Posse Kidnap. Now I can explode into the light, look around and take another bite out of life. And I came across this paragraph about the state of the novel today. Please indulge me as I share:
One of the most genial voices of disillusion is that of the novelist and critic Tim Parks, whose warmly contrarian complaints about the state of writing have been appearing regularly on the New York Review of Books blog. His latest installment is an honest, provocative, and maddeningly wrongheaded meditation about his unhappiness with what he calls “traditional novels.” The depth and scope of Parks’s dissatisfaction is fairly intimidating. He feels “trapped” within the expected forms of fiction writing, especially those of realistic fiction. These books’ basic traits, he thinks — “the dilemma, the dramatic crisis, the pathos, the wise sadness, and more in general a suffering made bearable, or even noble through aesthetic form” — have become mannered and artificial to the point of irrelevance. Even worse, their typical trajectory, from “inevitable disappointment followed by the much-prized (and I suspect overrated) wisdom of maturity,” is oppressive and harmful because its universality enforces a single way of understanding the world — a way that not only leads to the disenchantment that has come upon Parks but which also sustains a “destructive cultural pattern”: “We are so pleased with our ability to describe and savor our unhappiness it hardly seems important to find a different way of going about things.” (The New Yorker, November 7, 2013, Against “The Death of the Novel” posted by Sam Sacks).
The poor critic, I feel for him. He complains that the traditional novel form is executed too well but with no uplift, no juice, no joy. Sorry dude, but your disenchantment comes from the lens through which you read. It’s your inner attitude that makes you see as you do.
So what’s this tell me? Dear writers, it’s our job to burn bright -- get lit, stay lit and write accordingly. Imagine every reader’s slog through 350-pages of our next offering and find a way to reward them. The Greeks called is catharsis. Hollywood calls it “a willful suspension of disbelief.” Our readers want to leave the confessional and feel their spirits lightened, if not dancing on sunbeams. Otherwise they may never buy another ticket to our next novel.
So call upon your muses and ask for a blessing. Then rub up your ink, dip into your paint pot and pour a salve onto the torn souls of all mankind. Spin a yarn that weaves new fabric for life itself. On’ya.
One of the most genial voices of disillusion is that of the novelist and critic Tim Parks, whose warmly contrarian complaints about the state of writing have been appearing regularly on the New York Review of Books blog. His latest installment is an honest, provocative, and maddeningly wrongheaded meditation about his unhappiness with what he calls “traditional novels.” The depth and scope of Parks’s dissatisfaction is fairly intimidating. He feels “trapped” within the expected forms of fiction writing, especially those of realistic fiction. These books’ basic traits, he thinks — “the dilemma, the dramatic crisis, the pathos, the wise sadness, and more in general a suffering made bearable, or even noble through aesthetic form” — have become mannered and artificial to the point of irrelevance. Even worse, their typical trajectory, from “inevitable disappointment followed by the much-prized (and I suspect overrated) wisdom of maturity,” is oppressive and harmful because its universality enforces a single way of understanding the world — a way that not only leads to the disenchantment that has come upon Parks but which also sustains a “destructive cultural pattern”: “We are so pleased with our ability to describe and savor our unhappiness it hardly seems important to find a different way of going about things.” (The New Yorker, November 7, 2013, Against “The Death of the Novel” posted by Sam Sacks).
The poor critic, I feel for him. He complains that the traditional novel form is executed too well but with no uplift, no juice, no joy. Sorry dude, but your disenchantment comes from the lens through which you read. It’s your inner attitude that makes you see as you do.
So what’s this tell me? Dear writers, it’s our job to burn bright -- get lit, stay lit and write accordingly. Imagine every reader’s slog through 350-pages of our next offering and find a way to reward them. The Greeks called is catharsis. Hollywood calls it “a willful suspension of disbelief.” Our readers want to leave the confessional and feel their spirits lightened, if not dancing on sunbeams. Otherwise they may never buy another ticket to our next novel.
So call upon your muses and ask for a blessing. Then rub up your ink, dip into your paint pot and pour a salve onto the torn souls of all mankind. Spin a yarn that weaves new fabric for life itself. On’ya.
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We like to write and read and muse awhile and smile. My pal Prasad comes to mutter too. Together we turn words into the arc of a rainbow. Insight Lite, you see?
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