Edit: Hemingway, not Faulkner, read a comment about him just prior to this and got crisscrossed.
“The Old Man and the Sea could have been over a thousand pages long and had every character in the village in it and all the processes of how they made their living, were born, educated, bore children, etc. That is done excellently and well by other writers. In writing you are limited by what has already been done satisfactorily. So I have tried to learn to do something else. First I have tried to eliminate everything unnecessary to conveying experience to the reader so that after he or she has read something it will become a part of his or her experience and seem actually to have happened. This is very hard to do and I’ve worked at it very hard.”
Now I am not as well versed in the history of the quantity of new novels, but feel this concern of only writing things that had not been addressed before may have been more an issue when less was published than they are now. With the much larger quantities of books being published is there less a concern of writing something that is similar to something already authored?
by Micotu
7 Comments
More humanity is happening all the time.
I think you mean Hemingway.
There’s a lot of crap published now since publishing is so much simpler. The proliferation of boring fantasy series amazes me. I can’t imagine buying into such a thing, BUT … reading is reading, so good for them!!
And there are themes that appear, get copied and recopied, and then the next trend pops up. For instance, the “dogs I have known” books. And the novels set in bookstores copycats. Seaside romance and/or mystery. I could go on and on. But it’s not necessary to be original or creative. Just find a theme, get a story arc, write it, and do it again and again. It works!
Hemingway (not Faulkner) was known for his bare-bones prose and it does seem to be hard to do well because most authors seem to want to pad their books out to fit into the standard novel lengths.
Maybe I’m wrong, but The way I read this I think he is not saying that he wrote about the fisherman because that subject had yet to be done. I think the thing that “is done excellently and well by other authors” is the 1000 page book mentioned at the beginning.
He doesn’t see that as his niche. He’s not here to give a wide sweeping portrait of a whole community or and all its history. He wants to write a focused story that conveys a specific experience and all the context and emotion involved. That’s a very different writing style of which The old man and the sea is a perfect example.
I know that doesn’t answer your question, but I think it’s instructive. People are always having g similar experiences over and over again but in the telling there’s room for your own style and voice as a writer to come through
That…. is not at all what Hemingway says?
He does not say that you can not write about things that have not been adressed before. He said that the way of telling a single story in every little detail in thousands of pages had been done well enough to try something new. (Note that authors were paid by the word count).
The new thing is to focus on a very specific idea and journey for your reader and carefully carve out everything that is vital to that goal.
Reading and writing slowly went ‘mass market’, things like originality in style or substance largely take a back seat to the potential for profit now at the large publishing houses. Profitable books and authors get copycats really fast.
Well, that depends. If you’re writing for the marketplace, you are generally wanting it to conform to other products and be easily categorized, so you want it to be similar to other things. A brand emerges from things that are predictable and easy to explain.
If you’re writing for art, it’s the opposite. You’re wanting to build off of what’s been done before and try for something new. But unfortunately this sort of thing rarely makes money. The general public prefers familiar things reorganized to appear new over something that is truly new. Truly new stuff makes people uncomfortable.