I’m going to be honest: I’m very bored by modern literature. Especially modern short fiction.
There seems to be a serious house style going on here: bleak verbs. No adverbs. As few and uninteresting adjectives as possible. “Show, don’t tell” is the highest commandment of narrative. Resolution should be kept to an absolute minimum. Characters should be almost wholly defined by their flaws.
It was fun once, when Ernest Hemingway did it. But why are the brightest young minds of our generation repeatedly trying to rewrite “Hills Like White Elephants”?
There’s nothing explicitly wrong with writing about mundane, depressing events in a sparse style, but it’s so pedestrian.
The man himself often said that before he won the Nobel, Isak Dinesen should have won it, chiefly on the strength of her collected short works in Nine Gothic Tales. Where today is the writer with the courage to write about an abbess possessed by a demonic monkey who attempts to arrange a marriage between her homosexual nephew and an Amazon-like heiress by instigating a rape?
That is storytelling, friends. That is courageous creativity. Today, it wouldn’t be seen as serious work, but that’s because today’s writers are boring. The next time you sit down to write about some tedious, urban dysfunction, be brave. Do what no one will expect.
Use unnecessary words and go on unnecessary tangents. Tie up the end in a happy knot.
Bring on the monkeys.
