quality

Switching from the Pressure Cooker to the Crock-Pot: A (much needed) break

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Whew!

At this point last week, I had three looming deadlines ahead: a short story each for Binyan and for Binah BeTween, and my next batch of episodes for Glixman in a Fix, the serial currently running in Binah BeTween. I was feeling stressed out not just because these items needed to be in by this week, but by a whole string of deadlines, pretty much constant ones for months on end.

The Pressure Cooker

I had first drafts for both stories already written, and an outline to base the serial chapters on, but it was a lot of writing to complete in a single week. The previous few stand-alone pieces I did for the tween/teen magazines had not come as smoothly as usual, so I was feeling anxious. Trying to think of multiple fictional plots, spoken in the voices of multiple narrators, overlapping one another for months on end was wearing my creativity a little thin. The quality of my work had dropped, and it weighed on my mind.

In fact, Continue reading →

Mormon and Orthodox Jewish writers: Does optimism hold back fine writing?

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Mark Oppenheimer, in last Friday’s New York Times, posited that the optimistic attitude embraced by Mormons has prevented them from creating literary fiction. Sure, they have succeeded in Sci-fi (Orson Scott Card), fantasy (Stephanie Meyer), and books for teens and children (Shannon Hale, James Dashner, J. Lloyd Morgan).  But how many Mormon writer’s have won Pulitzers, National Book Awards, Bookers, or Nobels?

Oppenheimer interviewed a number of Mormon writers for his article, and includes some interesting insights:

“It is a fair thing to point out,” said Shannon Hale, a Mormon who writes young adult fiction, “that there have been very prominent Jewish writers that have received a lot of accolades, and worldwide the number of Mormons are comparable to the number of Jews, so why hasn’t that happened?”

Ms. Hale’s theory is that literary fiction tends to exalt the tragic, or the gloomy, while Mormon culture prefers the sunny and optimistic.

And also:

“I’ll tell you why they write young adult,” said Ms. Nunes. “Because they don’t have to write the pages and pages of sex. They don’t want to spend a lot of time in the bedroom.”

Another author pointed out that since Mormon theology strongly identifies with the idea of a Messianic redemption, Mormon writers gravitate towards the “savior motif.”

This all got me thinking. Even though Ms. Hale correctly identified Jews as successful authors of literary fiction, Orthodox writers are not foremost among them (despite examples of some who are, like Ruchama King Feuerman and Risa Miller and even, I’d argue, Bracha Rosman and Henye Meyers). And guess what? Continue reading →

Better Writing vs Better Sales: What makes a better writer?

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Today’s post from The Write Practice got me thinking. In it, Joe Bunting suggests that we worry too much about sales, and even about how good our writing is.

I love these two lines:

Does the fact that more people have read Twilight than have read [any book by] Mark Twain mean Stephenie Meyer is a better writer?

More important for us, does the fact that we are all less known than E.L. James (as far as I know) mean our stories aren’t as good?

metal chain

Your writing can be the chain that binds people together.

Bunting suggests we think “Connection” (with readers) over “Competition” (with other writers).

What Bunting says really appealed to me. Of all the kinds of feedback I get from my stories and articles, the ones that mean the most are the ones where people tell me that they identified with some aspect of what I’d written–particularly if the person is really different from me. This the kind of thing that bonds together humanity. Bunting would call this kind of connection literary success.

I’d call it something else: a measuring stick to use if you want to judge your writing’s moral quotient: will this writing bind people together, or will it tear them apart with strife? In that sense, “Good Writing” has a quality beyond the writer’s style or storytelling ability. It’s “Good” in the moral sense, as well.

What do you think?