LITERATURE: Reading

Not much I can add to Dan Green’s post on The Reading Experience: 

In his insistence that "the true enemies of the novel [are] plot, character, setting and theme," John Hawkes was proposing that fiction also might exhibit such a dispostion toward language, that it might be "poetic" and thereby defiantly, exultantly useless. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

After reading through 100 plus query letters, first pages, and comments on Miss Snark’s recent offer of critique, I was getting pretty depressed to find that there were about three that I really saw as creative and exciting.  Most were well-written, but lacked anything much over and above the same-old story with different setting and characters.  Relationship, health, money usually figured into the main conflict, and there was nothing to set them apart as truly innovative.  Unfortunately, the three that I particularly liked were deemed "a mess" by Miss Snark and a large percentage of her readers.

The importance of knowing the difference of good versus saleable must be noted by the hopeful writer.  If you want to get published, you need to get past the agent; it has never been as vital as it is in this day to make sure the agents you’re querying generally represent (therefore, like) the style and genre you are presenting.  Too, I’ve noticed that if you’re to get the agent’s attention, you have to have that hook in the first page.  Sometimes, in the query letter itself.

On the other hand, there are still some of us who while publication is the ultimate goal, we’re just not going to write for the agent alone.  There’s the reader to consider, and above that, there’s ourselves to please.  And let’s just hope there are always readers who are willing to enjoy experimental fiction as much as the creative writer needs to explore.