The International Style?
I’m mostly glad to be writing fiction in English because it’s enriched by many influences and unusually willing or able to absorb new ones (no Académie française, flexible syntax). Then there’s this, from Tim Parks in the New York Review Of Books Blog:
we are moving toward a world market for literature. There is a growing sense that for an author to be considered “great,” he or she must be an international rather than a national phenomenon. This change is not perhaps as immediately evident in the US as it is in Europe, thanks to the size and power of the US market and the fact that English is generally perceived as the language of globalization, so that many more translations go toward it than away from it.
Parks has some interesting thoughts on the consequences of this on what’s being written.
How much do you consider your audience when writing? My only attempts at novels so far have foundered too early to say whether audience considerations played any role in their failure. When writing stories, I’m conscious of techniques or subject other writers would have used in similar situations, but my attention is primarily consumed with sculpting my idea into English, and pulling the short story form to fit it. I’ve only idly considered how my prose would be rendered in translation.
To a degree, those of us writing in English are still cashing in on the legacy of the British Empire, the American effort in World War Two, and DARPA.
