As I mentioned previously, having entered Beneath the Lanterns in the Self Published Fantasy Blog Off contest netted me a nice review by Liis. There were several things about the review that struck me as interesting. The great thing about reviews like this is that they allow you to see your work from a different angle, with different eyes. This passage struck me as something I never considered:
"Litka strikes me as a confident author. Confident in what he does and how he wants to tell this story. He doesn't need to rely on the shock factor to keep the hooks in the reader."
I never thought of myself as a confident author in the sense that other authors might be less confident than me. I would think most authors write their story and only publish it when they have confidence that the story is good enough, if not great. Undoubtedly a lot of authors struggle to some degree or another while writing that story, but I don't think that struggle is reflected in the finished work. What I suspect the reviewer to be saying is that I wrote, and entered, a book in the contest that does not, in story or style, conform to the current fashion in fantasy. If that is the case, judging from the reviews of other contestants I've glanced over, she would be right. There is reason for this; I am not a fan of current fantasy and have read very little of it, and this was even more true when I wrote the story in 2018.
But perhaps there is a more vague meaning, which may be boiled down to knowing what I'm doing. As an author you need to know what you're doing. You need to know your audience; what they expect, and then deliver what they expect and more, if you can. But the key to writing with confidence is knowing who you are writing for.
I do. And I keep it simple. My audience is me.
This singularity of focus makes writing a whole lot easier. Knowing what exactly it is that I like to read means that it just becomes a matter of dreaming up a story that appeals to me and then writing it down. It's just that simple... Right. In any event, all this method then requires is a leap of faith that there are readers who like what I like. In the beginning that may have been a blind leap of faith, but over the years I know now that there are some people will like what I like. And that is enough.
I should mention that this is probably not be the best approach to take if you are aiming to write commercial fiction, i.e. stories designed to sell books in large numbers to a large audience, unless you yourself are very immersed in the large audience you are writing for, and thus, know that you and they want in a story. I am sure that there are authors who are lucky enough to find themselves in that position, but I suspect that for many others, to write books that sell in great numbers, they need to carefully study what sells, and then make themselves write books with the potential to sell. Writing for them, is a job.
Since I don't need or want a job, I write what pleases me, accepting that my work will appeal to a limited audience. I don't know if this is confidence so much as accepting that what will be, will be. I think this in either case, it is a pretty good attitude for most authors. Writing what's in your heart and head, brings out the best your creatively, while at the same time, making writing so much simpler and rewarding, independent of sales numbers.
This is not to say that I never take my readership into account. I do, sometimes. For example I set out to write the Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventure stories in part because they are set in the same setting as my most popular book, The Bright Black Sea. That said, I wrote them as mystery stories, using different characters and a different solar system, so they were not carbon copies of what I'd written before. I wrote them as mysteries, in part because I had something to say about mystery stories. The one thing I hate about mystery stories is that they almost always revolve around a murder, or two, or three... I don't know if mystery writers are just too lazy to come up with a mystery that matters that doesn't involve someone getting killed, or if murder is what the readers, i.e. the market, demand in mystery stories. Whatever. In my mysteries, since I still write for myself, none of them involve investigating a murder.
Liis also said in the review:
"What might not work for some readers? The Prose. I don't know what it is that makes readers shun lyrical prose these days. It's like an insurmountable mountain that masses, looking for quick and easy gratification, are unwilling to climb. But when you get into the prose, when you start to go with the flow, when you give it a chance the reward is worth it. I wouldn't say this title is overly descriptive, it is exactly what it advertises itself for - an old fashioned novel of adventure."
This was something of a head scratcher for me. I certainly don't think that I write with lyrical prose. Lord Dunsany writes lyrical fantasy. I don't. English for Liis, a Estonian who has lived in Ireland for a dozen years, is a second language, so that might explain it. I try to write in a conversational style, and I will admit that I often use two words where one will do, but I don't know if all that makes my writing "lyrical" as I understand the word, compared to modern fantasy writing.
Perhaps what she meant is that I have a distinctive narrative voice. I would like to believe I do. I try to make the narration flow as if the narrator was speaking to you, the reader. Plus, I am not concerned with taking "unnecessary" words out, like the writing advice I frequently come across tells me to do. So maybe my style is not as lean as the current style of writing, but I can't say for certain, as I've not read a lot of modern fantasy, especially self published fantasy. Most likely my writing reflects the books I love, and many of those were written in the first half of the last century which maybe what makes my writing different enough to comment about
However, this is once again a lesson illustrated in the last post; you write your book, your readers make it their own, and that version may not seem like the one you wrote. But you have to let go of your story. You have to let it, not you, speak to your readers. And the story may be better for it.
But enough of SPFBO. Next week... Writing Season. Stay tuned.
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