Tara Maya's Tales

The Literary Lab had a post recently about making each word, each sentence count in a novel. There was some argument in the comments about whether this was possible, or even desirable. One interesting accusation was that novelists who try to do this are secretly short story writers who haven't figured out the difference between 1000 and 100,000 thousand words. It may be even worse. It may be that novelists who try to do this are secretly poets. At times, especially if I've been off my meds for several days, I think of my novel as a ballad or epic of the ancient sort, in heroic rhyme. And why not? Much of the source material, the original epics upon which modern fantasies base their structure, were book-length poems. When I become stuck in my prose, and everything I type is ugly and repetitive, when all beauty and simplicity escapes me, I fall back on poetry. Seriously. I write a scene as a poem. Sometimes even with aliteration and rhyme, though often just with unrhymed mete...

In the discussion of literary vs genre fiction, two points were brought up regarding litarary fiction. One, is that it is especially important in literary writing to make every single word shine. Two, literary fiction should bring up existential questions. Scott Bailey put it like this on Lady Glamis' blog : Literary fiction, as far as I'm willing to define it, is as much concerned with form as with anything else, and where the subject matter is the experience of life, and the purpose is to give the reader a chance to experience life in a broader way than before. Or, to quote C.S. Lewis, "passion is present for the sake of imagination, and therefore, in the long run, for the sake of wisdom or spiritual health--the rightness and richness of man's total response to the world." I don't consider myself a literary writer; I reserve the right to toss magic-wielding barbarian hunks and kung-fu ten-headed rakshasas at my heroes, as well as to marry them all off to ...