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There's a blogger here - http://olensteinhauer.blogspot.com/2005/10/ambition-part-first.html - talking about the balance between accessibility and literary ambition, and that got me thinking yesterday.
I appreciate the need for accessibility; if you don't have it, no one will read what you write. I want to write stories that people will understand.
But I don't just want to write a formulaic story, either, that has all the right elements but doesn't try to reach higher. In part, that's what's delaying the pirate story that's trying to percolate in the back waters of my subconscious. I don't know what higher goal the story will serve, and without that I sort of lack direction. I could write boy gets kidnapped by pirates/boy becomes a pirate/boy redeems himself and pirates, but I want it to be more. And I haven't yet found the more that works with the setup, so there it sits.
(It's amusing as hell that I have such confidence that I could write the formulaic tale!)
The blogger is right on one count, I think; the one-novel-a-year climate in publishing definitely discourages writers from taking that extra step, reaching for that extra fillip of meaning. I want my work to have all those layers of meaning that enriches the experience of reading and makes me fall in love with a story. In order to have that depth, I need more than a year. On most projects. (Thinking about Cavalier Attitude, my 4-months-to-first-draft novel of two years ago. That one just fell out of my head.)
Depth. One more in a growing list of individually-calibrated tools in that writer's toolkit we're building--it's not a question that has only one right answer. Each writer will have a different point of balance, I suspect. And just as well, because I don't want to keep reading the same novel over and over!
I appreciate the need for accessibility; if you don't have it, no one will read what you write. I want to write stories that people will understand.
But I don't just want to write a formulaic story, either, that has all the right elements but doesn't try to reach higher. In part, that's what's delaying the pirate story that's trying to percolate in the back waters of my subconscious. I don't know what higher goal the story will serve, and without that I sort of lack direction. I could write boy gets kidnapped by pirates/boy becomes a pirate/boy redeems himself and pirates, but I want it to be more. And I haven't yet found the more that works with the setup, so there it sits.
(It's amusing as hell that I have such confidence that I could write the formulaic tale!)
The blogger is right on one count, I think; the one-novel-a-year climate in publishing definitely discourages writers from taking that extra step, reaching for that extra fillip of meaning. I want my work to have all those layers of meaning that enriches the experience of reading and makes me fall in love with a story. In order to have that depth, I need more than a year. On most projects.
Depth. One more in a growing list of individually-calibrated tools in that writer's toolkit we're building--it's not a question that has only one right answer. Each writer will have a different point of balance, I suspect. And just as well, because I don't want to keep reading the same novel over and over!
