At 08:10 PM 14/11/2005 -0500, you wrote:
>Badly written literary novels don't become "popular,"
because the people who
>read that "genre" are interested in the writing
itself, and can't ignore bad
>technique and cheating because of getting carried
away with idea and plot.
>Also, think of this, to write a literary novel you
need both depth of
>characterization and plot, but you can write a
plot-driven novel using
>only plot and some
>stereotypes, e.g. Agatha Christie.
Sure you can. And you can write a character-driven novel that
is under plotted, with lots of beautiful language and great
imagery and still have it called a literary success, e.g.
Michael Ondaatje. I've met all sorts of people who haven't
read The English Patient tell me how good it is. They feel
they should have ready it because it's supposed to be good
for them to read such stuff. Me, I think the novel's a
failure if people stop reading, for whatever reason.
Sometimes that reason is because there's not enough
happening, not enough plot, to engage their interest. And the
fact is, I don't trust a lot of Ondaatje's characters (even
in The Skin of A Lion) because I'm told so much about
them.
But that's me. Kerry
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 15 Nov 2005 EST