I was reading a post by another author who was criticising a recent rash of adverts on social media by people claiming to be able to teach how to write bestseller novels. Much of what they said I agreed with. Writing is an art but, like any other art form, it can be subverted into a formula that might produce some financial success but will not produce art itself. I think of it as an artist reproducing the work of master painters for a consumer audience. Yes, the formula might work and those who use it might sell a few paintings, or books, but without the spark of originality they are not going to produce anything that will be remembered for very long.
My books cover several genres because I write what is interesting to me. It might be claimed that I am not a commercially successful write as a consequence of that, but I never wanted to be a genre writer. I have written from a very young age, and I have always written to entertain myself first. I am not an author who agonizes over their work, instead I get happily lost int he worlds that I create. I have learnt the mechanics of writing through doing it, not paying someone else to teach me how to write according to a formula. Yes, having another perspective can be useful but I believe that when involved in something creative originality is far more important. Take Hollywood for an example. The Hollywood studios have turned out some amazing cinema, but the fact is that the those really great films are the ones that bucked the trend. The studios prefer not to gamble and so work to a formula. The vast majority of Hollywood movies are not actually that good. When an inventive director gets a chance and produces something wonderful, Hollywood simply milks it dry, tries to recreate the success using its formulaic approach, fails, and returns to the tried and tested method of producing okay movies. It then spends the next few years waiting for another creative mind to buck the system again. Hollywood rarely takes a chance on originality.
Pomerania is a book that I am working to make original in as many ways as I can. I am not sure if it has a genre yet, but then that consideration is unimportant to me. Writing the book is proving to be very entertaining. There is no struggle for ideas, no suggestion of writer's block, no procrastination of any kind. Rather, I would say that I am going to have to do some serious editing because I am not sure that I can get all of my ideas into the book. The aim is to capture as many of the experiences that I have had and then use each of them as a runway for a flight of fancy. That is the most accurate description that I can come up with at the moment. The plot is a little ambiguous, it only exists in my head, but it also appears to be revealing itself slowly with each paragraph that I write. When it is finished, I do not think that it will be accused of being formulaic, as I said, I am aiming for original!
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