Writers may find it difficult to bring attention to their work. Thanks to the internet, there are so many more people writing and places to publish and books available for free that it takes a lot of money, luck, or both to rise above the din.
Authenticity can help. In addition to being good for your soul, authenticity makes you more relatable and more memorable. Pursuing your passions – rather than chasing the market – can help you attract like-minded people, the very people who are most likely to enjoy, follow, and share your writing.
So be different. Take risks. Write what no one else is writing. If you follow as many blogs as I do, you’ve probably seen tips like “write a great premise!” and “create interesting characters!”, without any practical advice to back them up. Even when a blogger goes a bit deeper, their recommendations tend to come from the shallow end of what they personally find interesting and likely to sell well, rather than what’s truly unique.
Unlike this week’s look at being honest on the page, you can probably think of many examples of novels with attention-grabbing premises: A mystery told from the POV of an autistic boy (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time); a boy goes on a quest to solve a puzzle left behind by his father, who died on 9/11 (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close); a group of residents in a retirement community solve cold case murders (The Thursday Murder Club); etc., etc.
But even the most interesting genre novels – and I love them – are written in a fairly straightforward manner. Characters are introduced, the action rises and falls, the hero falters but probably wins the day, even if the win is not complete or what he expected. The drapery is unique but the scaffolding is familiar. Rarer, though, are those books that play with structure or language.
China Miéville’s The City and the City plays with storytelling and reader experience in an interesting way. In the book, considered part of the New Weird genre, two Eastern-European city-states simultaneously occupy the same physical space. Citizens of each city can see and interact with their counterparts in the other, but are forbidden by law from doing so. From childhood, they are trained to “unsee” the residents and buildings in their sister city, on penalty of being disappeared by a secretive organization known as the Breach. Miéville recreates the eeriness of his setting, describing what his narrator sees and shouldn’t see and unsees, before he introduces the concept of the blended cities. Thus the reader is left to figure out what’s happening. It’s incredibly disorienting and takes time to get accustomed to. In effect, by dropping the reader into the story world without explaining how it functions, Miéville trains the reader to see the world in the same way its citizens are trained to see only their part of it.
Miéville also uses description in an interesting way in The Last Days of New Paris, an alt-history novel in which Paris is still occupied by the Nazis in 1950. Along with guns and hand grenades, weapons of war include living Exquisite Corpses, real-world manifestations of surrealist art. Exquisite Corpse was a parlor game in which images were created by multiple players – usually artists, because of course – each contributing an element in sequence, based on agreed-upon rules. Here’s a classic example.
Want to experience creative brain-freeze? Imagine coming into a novel cold and reading a detailed description of the above and trying to imagine it as a living creature attacking a band of French resistance fighters. The description makes no sense, even upon multiple readings. You might wonder if your copy of the novel is missing some words or if perhaps you’ve had a mild stroke.
When I say that most writing advice isn’t structured to encourage risk-taking and authenticity, this is the kind of work I have in mind. Presented with The City and the City and The Last Days of New Paris in draft, the average writing guru would have argued for more context clues or backstory in the early scenes. While Don’t Confuse the Reader is great advice for novices, when that rule is set in stone, we risk losing our ability to surprise, challenge, and delight the reader as well.
Most of us will not rise to the occasion as well as China Miéville or my next inspiration, Alan Moore, whose personality, talents, intellect, and interests are uniquely suited to creative puzzles and complex plots and themes. However, if we’re going to learn, we might as well look to some of the best.
In his short story collection, Voice of the Fire, Moore creates 12 fantasy stories set in the same geographical location in England over the course of multiple centuries, beginning at the end of the Stone Age and continuing through medieval, Victorian, and modern times. Linked by geography, theme, and imagery, the stories are told through the points of view of various characters, including one that presents quite a challenge for the reader.
In “Hob’s Hog”, set in 4000 BC, the narrator is a stone age halfwit who is chased away by his tribe after the death of the mother who protected him. Whether Hob is developmentally challenged or merely an evolutionary left-behind we can’t know, but his vocabulary is extremely limited by modern times. Moore has said that he restricted himself to using some 1,200-1,400 words for the entire 45 page story, which required some creative combinations and permutations to convey what Hob sees and experiences in a way that a modern reader can grasp. Here’s how the story begins:
“A-hind of hill, ways off to sun-set-down, is sky come like as fire, and walk I up in way of this, all hard of breath, where is grass colding on I’s feet and wetting they.
There is not grass on high of hill. There is but dirt, all in a round, that hill is as like to a no-hair man, he’s head. Stands I, and turn I’s face to wind for sniff, and yet is no sniff come for far ways off. I’s belly hurts, in middle of I. Belly-air come up in mouth, and lick of it is like to lick of no thing. Dry-up blood lump is come black on knee, and is with itch. Scratch I, where is yet more blood come.”
You can see that Hob’s ability to describe himself and his world is constrained. He has no words for behind, atop, smell, stomach, taste, or scab, or even the self-referential me, my, or myself.
Try that on for 45 pages.
It’s not easy to read and there’s certainly no skimming any of its pages, not if you want to follow the whole story. It took me as long to read the first story as it did the remaining twelve. While the story was challenging, the reward was worth it, and I imagine Moore felt the same when he finished writing it.
Few of us will master our craft to the point where we can create a sense of disorientation in our readers or box in their worldview with a limited vocabulary, but we can be bold in our own ways and it never hurts to challenge ourselves. You don’t have to confess a dirty secret to put a lot of yourself on the page.
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