Hi Colin, Fredegonde, Emma, and Roger,

This thread has certainly kept me thinking for the last few days about how I write.

Colin I've already got a few ideas up my sleeve more more mass market appeal efforts but I don't think, even in my darkest hour, I could scrape the barrell like Dan Brown. My second book, Smoke, is more along that vein, have a look at the first chapter it's in tha archives. See what you think.

The point Emma raised about something that might appear normal or mundane to the writer but actually be very appealing to the reader is sometihng that fascinates me. Many a time I've written something and been really unhappy with it only for someone to read it and think that it's amazing.

The often happens when I spend hours, days, weeks on a section and by the time I've finished it, it seems so laboured, so slow and awkward but reading back later, it scans in moments.

Roger, the pieces Far from Shore, Love is Suicide and The State We're In are all from Feeling Gravity's Pull if you want to read more.

Geoff

Geoff, I totally support non-commercial and experimental fiction. I keep meaning to do more reading on the site, so I'll have a look. I've been wondering for some time just how deliberate Dan Brown's style is; considering the fact that he teaches creative writing, it really does seem that he's breaking all the basic rules. I've mentioned his annoying, bouncing POV and internal thoughts in another thread. But the bugger sells... grrrr.

Colin

Hi Colin,

I don't think it has anything to do with his writing style other than the fact that it's for the most part complete shite. There are hundreds, thousands of books out there virtually identical that don't sell. The secret behind Brown's success is nothing more than vicious marketing, the slight pretence of controversy and the so called validity of his story. Basically he's just a writer who fell into the right niche at the right time. If you want to understand how he sells you'd be better of studying marketing than trying to glean anything meaningful from his books.

Geoff

Thanks, Emma. You're right, of course. I tend to get a bit paranoid about 'saying the right thing' on internet forums, because I often make a mess of online communications. In 'real life', I'm a polite, quiet, fairly normal young person, but put me on the internet and I become either too zealous or too reserved or too obsequious or too aloof, or hysterical in some way... like this one

But sometimes I think the most interesting thing is when something seems ordinary and inevitable to the writer, and then others are amazed and shocked (in a literary sense, if not in an emotional sense).

That is fascinating. Also -- considering that being revolutionary wasn't always such a good thing -- I wonder how many writers managed to disguise the groundbreaking nature of their work so that it wasn't discovered until long afterwards?

Everyone is affected by everything we experience. A good writer is one whose senses are more keen, sharper and developed. Reading the works of other writers is important but, in my opinion, is too overated as a major source of a writer's literary skills and abilities.

There is the prime factor of 'interpretation' when we experience anything. I mean by this the way we look at this or that (be it an event or emotion), and the way we store this in our memory banks.

Take the mention of walking along a railway platform and someone who is sitting down, looks at you. EmmaD might well have the idea that the person 'fancies' her; I am sure that Waxy will 'see' something threatening or even menacing in the eyes of that person. Two very creative writers experiencing the same simple event but storing it away in different compartments of their memory banks.

To attempt to write in the style of other writers is to deny one's individuality. Sure, admire, even love or hate the work of other writers but never try to emulate their style.

Len

Fredegonde, I think it's interesting that authors we now see as ground-breaking - Austen, Dickens - were extremely successful in their day. I don't believe that the proportion of readers who are and aren't prepared to persevere with something 'difficult' has changed, it must be that they disguised their ground-breakingness successfully. I think that's a real difference from now. It's as if since then writers have broken so much ground that they're farming far out while the bulk of the population is still in the town, looking out with astonishment and sometimes incomprehension, over their Victorian parks and allotments, to the tiny figures out there in the wilderness. Personally, I blame Henry James, much as I love his work.

Len, you're quite right. I was mentally constructing a list of the possible things one might think, from 'God, he must think I'm fat,' to 'oh I wonder if he fancies me?' and all stages in between (things like, 'I knew this skirt was the wrong colour' to 'I wonder if my hem's coming down?'. And then I realised how gender-specific I was being, and that I haven't the faintest idea what a man would think in the same position, or what the range of his possible thoughts might be, depending on his character and current state of self-esteem.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more revealing this little scenario is. Not only for oneself: it might be useful in one of those stuck moments when all your characters seem un-differentiated and boring. You could make a little list of what each of them would be thinking as a) the walker and b) the sitter on the bench. I bet it would shake out some things you didn't know you knew about them.

The only problem I'd have is that they didn't have railway platforms in the 15th Century.

Emma

EmmaD,

You have hit exactly the point I was making; the way in which the individual creative mind takes the most innocuous of happenings and from there builds and develops the knitting wools that the writer spins into good yarns.

I think you're being awkward about railway platforms in the 15th Century... typical woman! Hey, that brings another thought... would the subsequent train of thought (excuse pun) be along the same lines for the ladies and/or would men be similar with playing their trains with ideas of a similar nature?

One thing is certain, some ideas may run alongside one another but they will always be individual and increasingly different the further they travel.

I believe that style develops from the way we handle the vast quantity of thoughts that we can encourage from the most mundane of stimulation.

Len

It's also interesting to think that someone might be a reluctant revolutionary. Fanny Burney springs to mind, not because she was experimental stylistically (though she wasn't exactly old-fashioned either), but because she tried hard to be a good, respectable middle-class woman of the 18th century, and yet her deep ambivalence about a woman's role in society & about the dynamics of that society in general shines through from her novels. She would have blushed to be called a revolutionary, but there's definitely a revolutionary subtext in her writing. Then again, her novels were bestsellers in their day, so I suppose the subtext didn't seem so very clear back then!

It's as if since then writers have broken so much ground that they're farming far out while the bulk of the population is still in the town, looking out with astonishment and sometimes incomprehension, over their Victorian parks and allotments, to the tiny figures out there in the wilderness.

True. Perhaps, also, writers (or artists in general) are so far out because there's nothing to stop them? Nobody wants to be the philistine who boos at the next Beethoven/Picasso/Joyce. The safest way is to approve of everything; at least you won't be blamed for being too stupid to understand it.

(Of course, I'm not talking about sales figures here, but about whoever decides what's 'good art' and what isn't...)