I am a regular listener of the podcast So You Want to Be a Writer which features Alison Tait and Valerie Khoo from the Australian Writers Centre. It is a really good podcast about all things writing and I really enjoy listening to it.
I’m running a little behind at the moment but in the last podcast I listened to (number 64), from probably about a month ago, they spoke to the historical romance author Anne Gracie. There was a lot of really interesting stuff in the interview, and I particularly like listening to authors of genres I rarely or never read. And Gracie made me think about reaching out into some romance to see what it is like.
But one of the best gems for me was when Gracie spoke about the value of the story in a novel.
Gracie used the example of 50 Shades of Grey. Now, I have some major issues with this book — primarily because I believe it is a story that glorifies domestic abuse. In doing so it gives S&M, a community I believe has a huge culture of consent, a bad name. But moving beyond that there have been lots of writers, and non-writers alike, who have been stunned that a book of such poor writing has managed to be so popular.
I’ve had similar feelings about other popular books as well. Recently I started the book Still Alice after I saw, and loved, the movie. Yet, as I started reading it I found the writing clunky and hard to get into. I haven’t gone very far but it feels a little too descriptive, lacking the emotional pull I really wanted.
When I read this stuff, I tend to think, “how they hell did they manage to be so popular?” How can poor writing become so immensely popular?
I think Anne Gracie has a really good point. In the podcast, talking about 50 Shades of Grey, she says that when you think about that book you have think not what about E L James hasn’t done (written the book well), but what she has done. And what she — and Lisa Genova (the author of Still Alice) has done — has been to write great stories.
This is a really important lesson. I’ve definitely noticed that as I write more I become more of a perfectionist. I spend more time worrying that this sentence doesn’t read quite well, or that that sentence could have a better word in it.
It’s important, but at the same time it’s not important enough. The most beautifully written boring story in the world is never going to be as well received as a slightly clunky extremely beautiful story. The writing is important, but the story is more important.
This is the same for non-fiction as well. I like to read Žižek for example — he’s an amazing philosopher. I do this even though sometimes I find his writing very difficult. Žižek is hard to get through. But I keep going because the ideas he brings up are amazing. Sometimes he blows my mind and that is worth plugging my way through.
Would I prefer his writing was a bit more comprehensible? Of course. The same as I would love for every author to have beautiful prose and be able to write stories with perfect sentences.
But in the end that doesn’t matter. It is the stories — or the ideas — that count. You can write as much as you want but if you have no stories, then what does it matter?
For me, this means thinking a bit more about focusing some more of my time on how I shape my stories rather than how I shape my sentences. Give some energy to that element and I hope I can come out with some winners.