Reply to your reading list: I read several new novels (and reviewed a few), but also tried to "catch up" on some late 20th-century books: including some by my favorite, Penelope Lively (such an intelligent writer), and most recently Carol Shields's Stone Diaries, which knocked my socks off. Both these non-American authors develop POV as a narrative technique in their unique, inventive ways, which happen to break our standard "rules." I wonder if our U.S. teaching methods aren't more hindrance than instructive in the area of imagination. Any thoughts?
I hear you. I do think that prescriptive formulas can be a death knell for certain writers/ certain kinds of stories. When I was in grad school the instructors liked to tell us how hard it was to get published, how few of us would succeed; I think they thought they were doing us a kindness. Of course they were right but they were adding to the zeitgeist of ... dismay? Discouragement? I was pleased when I saw that MO changing into one of: here's how you can do it. Maybe it came from a more helpful, encouraging place. But the flip side of that is a kind of hardening of acceptable creative output. You can only tell stories a certain way—which as you point out is a HUGE hindrance to many (and kind of goes against the idea of creativity itself). It's hard to find a mentor or editor who encourages the unusual. At the same time, in tandem, I've noticed a shift from writing to instructing others how to write (hey, I've done it myself). That seems to be where the money is these days.
Reply to your reading list: I read several new novels (and reviewed a few), but also tried to "catch up" on some late 20th-century books: including some by my favorite, Penelope Lively (such an intelligent writer), and most recently Carol Shields's Stone Diaries, which knocked my socks off. Both these non-American authors develop POV as a narrative technique in their unique, inventive ways, which happen to break our standard "rules." I wonder if our U.S. teaching methods aren't more hindrance than instructive in the area of imagination. Any thoughts?
I hear you. I do think that prescriptive formulas can be a death knell for certain writers/ certain kinds of stories. When I was in grad school the instructors liked to tell us how hard it was to get published, how few of us would succeed; I think they thought they were doing us a kindness. Of course they were right but they were adding to the zeitgeist of ... dismay? Discouragement? I was pleased when I saw that MO changing into one of: here's how you can do it. Maybe it came from a more helpful, encouraging place. But the flip side of that is a kind of hardening of acceptable creative output. You can only tell stories a certain way—which as you point out is a HUGE hindrance to many (and kind of goes against the idea of creativity itself). It's hard to find a mentor or editor who encourages the unusual. At the same time, in tandem, I've noticed a shift from writing to instructing others how to write (hey, I've done it myself). That seems to be where the money is these days.
Happy New year to you! This year titling sounds like a good idea, slightly off balance from the mainstream, in one's own flow.
Yeah, I definitely need to be off balance from the mainstream this year, maybe even blind to it, lol.