As a reader, I have known that good writing is really all that matters. Even when I was a kid. As a writer, I know that market category forces us into a Procrustean deal with the devil. Warping our work so that it conforms to a certain artificial standard is the surest way to ruin it. The devil of it is that it won’t sell to most editors or publishers unless it conforms fairly closely to established market categories. And so the dance to the death of decent writing begins.
Freeing one’s self from the gatekeepers allows one to write in whatever way is natural and supportive to the story being told. In this way, writing can prevail over market considerations. In this way, we can begin educating readers to appreciate good writing rather than anticipate given sets of approved tropes and topoi.
Another aspect of commercial fiction that should be examined more closely is the effect movies have had on the way stories are told, and the type of writing considered acceptable to deliver such stories. Essentially, every movie you have ever seen follows very closely the same pattern. The success of any given movie is directly tied to how closely that pattern was followed. It is so precise one can actually use a stopwatch to predict when certain types of scenes will arise and in what order. This is not because of some conspiracy, but, rather, because moviemakers have over the years refined the elements that work most effectively to communicate story information to the audience in a pattern most human minds find accessible and gratifying. Consequently, there is much to be learned from cinema.
In literary writing, which means simply stories told in words, commercial success is often fairly accurately predictable by examining how closely a story or book adheres to the established movie patterns. One consideration is what Isaac Asimov called up front invisible prose. By this, he meant writing that delivers information without drawing attention to itself. A plain style. A direct, blunt style. Kurt Vonnegut said to forget all about suspense because it is based on withholding information. He advised young writers to say simply and directly what they need and want to say, and to give the readers all the information necessary up front. This was his golden standard for writing. Elmore Leonard boiled his writing advice down to, “Leave out the parts people don’t read.” By this he meant descriptions of things they already know from their lives, lengthy explanations, fancy or complicated phrasing, and other things people tend to skip over to get to either the next story point or the next character point. Be concise. Mark Twain advised using the correct word and avoiding dollar words when penny words sufficed. Cut out boring stuff. Write like Hemingway, not James Joyce.
As to quality, that is usually judged by how pertinent, relevant, and insightful a given piece of fiction is to our human experience. This means good fiction is clear, means something to us, and gives us what other writers have characterized as the cool stuff. Vivid scenes and brief dialogue exchanges tend to be the basic things people remember from reading fiction. It is the same with movies. “Go ahead, make my day.” If you deliver those scenes clearly and directly the readers appreciate it. They enjoy the movies in their heads that good reading gives them. Be Hitchcock, not Kubrick if appealing to the widest number of people is your goal.
Of course, Hitchcock was known as the master of suspense. He achieved his brand of suspense less by withholding information and more by leading the viewer’s eye to telling details that informed the reader of things the protagonist might not at that moment know or realize. He hinted at dark possibilities, ulterior motives, or sinister plans. He suggested rather than showing blatantly and made certain to offer unambiguous reaction shots conveying the emotional content as well as the action in each scene. Scenes were put together with clockwork care and intricacy. Each step led inevitably precisely where he wanted the viewers attention to go. When an action was set up, consequences followed. Many times, anticipated consequences would be delayed, permitting more detailed examination of the potential disaster awaiting, the effects on people’s daily lives of the consequences of the anticipated event. In this way he grounded even the most outré of plot events in our common human experience.
Writers of literary fiction can learn a great deal from our best film directors.
More important than source, however, is the constant alertness to observing how good fiction works and why bad fiction fails. To be a writer is to be a reader. To be a writer is to read everything from short stories, novels and newspapers to magazines, essays, and poetry and, yes, movies. In fact, learn to read life. View any and all observations made in real life in terms of writing fiction. How to use that, how to present it, how it matters are the kinds of questions to ask. Attempt to read everything as story. Life itself is fiction waiting for a writer to grasp it in words.
Be soon and write well.
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“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
