I want different things from fiction than the market currently provides, at least in any great abundance.
For example, I don’t enjoy atmospherics. I especially dislike long passages describing a place everyone is already vaguely familiar with (even more so when the process is used by the author solely to demonstrate verbal wizardry.)
Though it is not recent, take this passage from Brideshead Revisited:
“Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman’s day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days—such as that day—when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft vapours of a thousand years of learning.”
— Evelyn Waugh
That is beautiful, highly evocative writing. It is much better than anything I can produce.
But it bores me when books go on and on that way.
(Also, please note that I’m passing up an easy ‘soft vapours’ joke about Waugh’s prose in an effort to seem mature. It is a moment of personal growth.)
What about emotional depth and backstory?
Continue reading “What I Want From Fiction”
Stanton Fenwick 