Diversity and the fast track to improve your writing
Today is still gonna be about creativity, but with I’m gonna jab at marketing and the publishing industry here and there. Lovely, right?
On the hunt for the mythical unique style
There’s nothing that marketing departments love more than an unique style from a fresh new perspective. It may stand to reason then than an aspiring writer would wish to cultivate this sense of distinctiveness. We want to be the shiny new voices and the next big thing unlike any other.
While there is merit to the idea and I’ll go into details, this concept clashes with reality in several places:
Most books you will find in a shop will be strongly tied to their genre and their culture.
Publishers are on the prowl for sales and their are risk-averse. Agents are there trying to find the next Harry Potter, or the next 50 shades, an habit that inevitably produces rows upon rows of similar work.
Humans live not in a vacuum. What you are and what you think - subsequently, what you write and how you do it - has been influenced by a variety of factors. The combination of those factors surely do make you unique, but your fellow humans share the same degree of uniqueness.
In other words, this is something I like to call the cardinal sin of confusing marketing with actual creative work. In other words, in the research for literary success or recognition, it’s far too easy too take marketing buzzwords face value.
This is the latest rehash of the ages-old debate of imitation vs originality1. Not to mention that the “unique style” is not even a general rule. Some prolific thriller authors have made a career on making their style as unobtrusive as possible as to not get in the way of the next summer read.
Defeating the fear of being derivative (in a handy, definitely not sarcastic numbered list)
So far so good (at least I hope). Buzzwords aside, there is indeed a push to stand out, the innate desire of being recognized as good, maybe special, even? I will refrain the urge to psychoanalyze this tendency. There’s nothing wrong, after all, in wanting to improve one’s craft.
This is where diversity comes in. Hold your horses there, before unsubscribing.
1. Unpacking the “read a lot” advice
I expect everyone reading this to have stumbled into King’s “read a lot, write a lot” suggestion, not only because his part-manual part-biography On writing is quite famous, but by the nature of the internet and quotable sentences.
I think there’s a deeper implication in that which is not as well grasped2. Not only it’s good to read a lot - read a lot from various sources. I might also want to add diverse. Yes, it’s true - different communities will have different viewpoints on life.
This goes for genre too, by the way. I don’t care if you only write the niche of Weird Literary Horse Erotica (I hope this is not a real thing, but I know I’m wrong). Exposing yourself to what other genres, maybe equally arcane, can only benefit you.
Compare and contrast with the idea of echo bubbles on social networks.
2. Incorporate diversity into your TBR
There is value in knowing the inner workings of your target market or genre. There is also value on teaching yourself that those rules are in now way absolute.
Different people write about different themes - this should be good per se, since if you’re writing you should at least be a little bit interested in the human condition. But even leaving content aside, there are huge variation on form across different cultures and eras.
What would fly in the golden age of American sci-fi would have a little space in today’s scifi market. Meanwhile, I went through an anthology of Chinese sci-fi (with stories from Liu Cixin, Han Song, Wan Jinkang and many more) and was surprised by how different the storytelling was.
Different markets select differently, which in turns cultivates a different taste in readers. Being aware of how varied published literature is will help you build your own style, without having to be chained to a single market’s arbitrary conventions.
3. Challenge yourself.
It’s great to write what you know. It’s also great to write how you do best. However, if you always stick to the well-trodden path you’ll never discover anything new.
I’m a great fan of writing short stories and I’m sure you’ll see me ranting about them many times in this substack. The short story format is a great sandbox where you can do literally everything. It’s the perfect place to experiment with style, themes, genre, POV, and characters, and you can’t go wrong - you can do as many bad choices as you like, since at worst you’ll be losing around 1 week on the first draft. Novels, on the other hand, require a different kind of time commitment.
Back to the point - you might stuff yourself with theory on the differences between a first person narrator and a third omniscient one, but practice (and maybe practice only) makes perfect. Exercises can be just that - an occasion to flex your writing muscles. The skill you pick up will come in handy later on, maybe in ways you wouldn’t expect.
Case study - Reality and Contagion
Let me end on a classic eye-rolling moment: an author talks about his own book.
When I wrote RaC I drew mainly from the speculative fiction I had read at that point. We’re talking classics like Asimov, recent giants like Ted Chiang, the usual suspects (Lovecraft, Poe) for horror, some magical realism a la Murakami, some speculative and satiric fiction from my own country (Calvino, Benni).
Two years later I am still discovering new horizons in all of those genres. Writing now I have a more solid, encompassing (although not in any way complete) view of scifi, a better understanding of the weird genre as a transition from Chambers to Lovecraft to Ligotti, more insight on the often forgotten writers of my own country, a better grasp of the new weird through Vandermeer and Mieville, some exploratory glances in Japanese literature with Dazai, Kobo, Mishima, Takahashi, Kawbata and Yoshimoto. And my involvement with several literary magazines opened a world of aspiring, but extremely insightful, writers from across the globe.
Better still, I know there’s are still oceans of books out there to read. It’s downright criminal that I still hadn’t found the time to explore the south american magical realism movement3.
Suffices to say, if I were to rewrite the anthology now, it would be different. My future works will carry the results of my new, broadened understanding of genre conventions.
Time to wind down this already long rant. The bottom line: we have bookshelves full of clever, imaginative, elegant stories to learn from. Not to do so would be to our own detriment. At the end of the day, we might still have to bend our creativity to the shackles of marketing (e.g. to make ends meet), but there is comfort in making a conscious choice, in knowing that there is a broader world out there, and ultimately, there is freedom on the page yet unwritten.
I also know some people hold the belief that you don’t need to “read a lot” to write good stories. While I concede that stranger things have happened, in my anecdotal experience this comes from people trying to justify their laziness, maybe due to a rooted belief in their own exceptionality.
We had a lot of Màrquez’ books laying around in my parents’ house, so I don’t understand why I still didn’t read one.