Before I jump into the subject matter of my future writing, I have to talk a little bit about writing style. For a long time I avoided reading novels, both out of laziness and because I wanted to preserve my own writing style. That's because I knew that, if presented with excellent writing, I'd just start mimicking it. That's not too bad as a starting point though, so I stopped being lazy and started reading a lot of novels.
And, oh boy, there's so much garbage out there. And so much people enjoying that garbage. No wonder some of the most popular book series of the past decade are meant for teenagers: Readers typically don't go beyond teen levels of reading proficiency, let alone mental maturity. At the same time, writers would hide their lack of talent and their superficial subject matter by using the excuse that the books are meant to be read by teenagers.
Conversely, there are those writers that are more linguists than writers, playing with words and rhymes in a masturbatory manner. The writing ends up being insipid, vapid and nearly devoid of any meaning, but the intense mental exercise required to even figure out what it's talking about is enough to give both the reader and writer a false sense of feeling clever.
And yes, of course, it all ends up being about the story. We end up with expectations from the genre, and how well the story plays out within that genre is what will make the book popular or not. We then end up with "good books" being as formulaic as Bollywood movies. Now, with self-publishing, Oprah's book club and e-books, humanity has never seen such a quantity of books. When you have to chose a book title based on SEO, it's now the time to admit that things went badly wrong.
Let's look at writing at a more fundamental level. To write, I think you need to have a good style and something unique to say. Otherwise you're just noise. Sure, everybody has something unique to say, but quite frankly most don't have style. And even if you do have something unique to say, even assuming some bland style, do you have enough of it to fill a few hundreds of pages, let alone the time and discipline to write it all?
Back to yesterday's question of the "about what", it is safe to assume that, since it's easier to write about things you're familiar with, I'd write about software development. For fiction, that's kind of a bad subject. Unless it's used as allegory for something else... I'll go through some examples tomorrow.
Published on July 2, 2012 at 20:16 EDT
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