Novel Thoughts
What/How-not-to-write lists usually seem to me to be singularly unhelpful: checking one’s work against them while writing makes for cramped prose and stunted concepts. But longer works, novella-length short stories and novels, take long enough to write—at least for me—that in slack moments sizing up a work in progress can save a lot of time and heartbreak.
Mark Sarvas’s list, made after judging last year’s Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, seems to me unusually good—generous-spirited, and general enough to transcend genre and topic.
I’ve been a reader for two novel prizes. What I noticed above all was a direct correspondence between the line-by-line interest of the prose and the fullness of the book’s conception—and my interest in sticking with it. With only one exception—a fantastic satire about crystal meth addiction that I really, really want to see on the shelves—my judgment on page one was the same as when I finished. For me, so much of developing my own style and what I find rewarding in other writers comes down to voice: a complex cocktail of subject matter and prose style that really can’t be evaluated except on its own terms; a unique way of structuring thought and experience. Which brings to mind Mark’s last points: warning against works that seem familiar, and that don’t justify their existence:
To be sure, there are no new stories or new truths, but if we are going to revisit certain ones time and time again, it seems absolutely necessary – at least to this writer and reader – that it’s a story that needs to see the light of day, a story without which we’d be somehow poorer.
