What do you want to read?
Tales of daring do, swashbuckling adventures, trashy romance, somber soliloquy regarding modernity.
Are you an escapist or a cathartic?
One who prefers to be taken away into worlds of wonder and glory with vistas of such beauty it brings a tear to the eye.
Or are the tears brought about by empathy with characters working through their problems and allowing you the same by proxy.
So often we try to explore these ideas rhetorically, but I’m directly asking you.
What do you want to read?
What do you like to read?
Why do you read it?
I ask because I haven’t found much satisfaction lately.There have been a few instances of exception.
I find I like quality writing and storytelling. Relatable or completely not, what matters is the skill with which the author creates the world, inhabiting characters, and their tumultuous arc through it all. Is it well handled?
I find a significant lack of that, rather instead I find cheap hooks and ploys with overwritten mellifluous descriptions of finery and frippery heavily reliant upon shock tactics and egregious twists for their own sake.
When I write I rely upon a steady diet of good words consumed through the ocular orifices – whether in textual or visual form (i.e. Cinema) – and I just can’t seem to get that.
So I ask, what do you want to read?
I find myself going more introspective with my prose of late. Like examining the inner workings of a geared mechanism and trying to evoke the sense of time through a glancing description of a clockwork.
I find myself making my reader want to work for it.
Perhaps that is a bit offputting but I don’t feel like writing something that pacifies the mind with unrealistic expectations of the world. That wistful desire to be fed grapes on a beach by an aesthetically appealing individual which is quickly dashed upon the rocks of reality. Those kinds of works I find actually degrade the human spirit instead of uplifting it. By showing a world that cannot be, by playing to your lacks and wants and wishes that are not met by your current life, that momentarily boost your mood but ultimately squash it with an overwhelming sensation of inadequacy and dissatisfaction.
I’d rather inspire and cause an examination of thought and circumstance. Perhaps it is a bit of an empathetic catharsis approach…guiding one to an insight…but I think not. I want to introduce an escapist element as well in which instead of escaping into the fiction, the fiction enables an escapement in your own life. Removing yourself from a trap of supposed inadequacy and lack.
Would you want to read something like that?
Something that challenges you?
That doesn’t make it easy?
Would you?
Cause I want to write it.
-j.e. pittman