A Quote by Lynn Coady
Considerations of plot do a great deal of heavy lifting when it comes to long-form narrative - readers will overlook the most ham-fisted prose if only a writer can make them long to know what happens next.
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With a novel, you have the reader with you a lot longer, and you owe him a lot more. Obviously you have to have a plot - I say "obviously," although I think a lot of fiction doesn't, and nothing seems to happen. But to me, there should be something that happens, and it should be at least vaguely plausible. And because the readers are going to be with these characters for a long time, you have to get to know them and like them and want to know what happens to them.
I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.
The novel has always been a contradictory form. Here is a long form narrative mainly read originally by consumers who were only newly literate or limited in their literacy. The novel ranked below poetry, essay and history in prestige for a long time.
The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. I know people who read without hearing the sentence sounds and they were the fastest readers. Eye readers we call them. They get the meaning by glances. But they are bad readers because they miss the best part of what a good writer puts into his work.
Art, whatever form it takes, requires hard work, craftsmanship and creativity. As a writer, I know my grammar, cadence, the music of prose, and the art of the narrative.
With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.
I hope to be with you as a writer for a very long time, and I hope that you will enjoy reading my work, because readers are the highest form of life on this planet.
You save most fuel by lifting and coasting in the heavy braking zones at the end of long straights into slow corners.
Of course I know that the twins are only words on a page, and I'm certainly not the sort of writer who talks to his characters or harbours any illusions about the creative process. But at the same time, I think it's juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren't real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative.
There's only so long you can play the silent type standing in the background. 'GoldenEye' was good for that. I was the villain: James Bond was doing all the heavy lifting. I liked that.
If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.
I've found I can plunge the characters into whatever absurd, awful situation, and readers will follow as long as the writer makes them seem like 'real people.'
Long before the idea of a writer's conference was a glimmer in anyone's eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.
The mistake that people made around 2000 with the emergence of the web was that they thought that people would not read long-form on a screen. Following from that idea, they quit doing long-form on screens. It got shorter and shorter, and then came cats toying with flowers and all of those clichés, but it was wrong. People will read long-form on a device if they want to read long-form.
As investors, we want to believe we are smart, insightful and uniquely talented - even though we often fail to do the heavy lifting, put in the long hours, and make the uncomfortable but necessary decisions to achieve success.
I do think that narrative, long-form nonfiction is the perfect form because it's rooted in something very real, but we're also, you know, completely spiritual, emotional creatures driven by all sorts of desires and needs.
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