Critcal Mass Market
Jane Espenson the great TV scriptwriter* makes an interesting point about writers and aspiring writers:
[Branko in Croatia] points out something I hadn’t consciously noticed, which is the tendency of aspiring television writers to get hyper-critical about television. Good point. This does happen. In order to acquire tv-writing skills, you have to start applying critical thinking to those shows you want to emulate. And the side effect of critical thinking is that you start thinking critically. You notice things: Hey! That important event happened off-screen! Hey! That moment sold out that character! Hey! That act break didn’t leave me wanting more!
Keeping Steve’s letter in mind, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the same thing happens to writers of other kinds as well.
It very much does. Case in point: For the last week or so, I’ve been reading J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories. Now, I was never a huge Salinger fan in High school. I tried reading Catcher in the Rye but I think I was too old (I was 17 and if you haven’t read it by the time you’re 15, don’t bother. Everything that strikes a 15 year old as startling and profound hits your jaded 17 year old like a sack of doorknobs. “Yeah, great, Holden, I figured that shit out a while ago.”) But lately, every writer I read about or story I find interesting circles back in some way to Salinger and his extra special Nine Stories. So I decide to try him on for size again. So far, I’ve read about half of them and they are hit or miss. My attitude is probably colored by my poor reception of his only previously perused work but I’m just finding these stories to be lacking something that other people claim to find there. Sure, the dialogue is decent (though dated) and he is a technically good writer. But still, something is missing. Most of the stories I’ve read so far start off week but build to an interesting if not altogether satisfying ending (except for, For Esme, With Love and Squalor, which goes in the oposite direction).
But perhaps this is just the over-analytical side of my writing getting the better of me. The stories work, most of the time and for your average reader, I’m sure they’re great (so long as you aren’t yet out of your early twenties. Salinger may have broken ground in the world of Serious Fiction 50 years ago, but today he would be a Young Adult Author).
of course, having said that, I’ve decided to borrow Salinger’s structure for my novel-in-progress and am writing it now as a series of interconnected stories. So he’s clearly doing something I like, it just isn’t telling a story a 29 year old can relate to.
So yeah. We aspiring writers can get hypercritical but it helps hone our craft. Maybe when I’m done with Nine Stories I’ll pick up The Martian Chronicles again. Ray Bradbury is the antidote to age and overanalysis.