I call them a marque, or brand. I've never seen anything specially admirable or the converse in having or not having a 'comfort zone'; and God knows my tropes are obvious enough. Cricket; the corpus of English poetry and English choral music; rurality; the C of E; real cider and real ale.... And of course, the triumph of good in the end, and the military (or Auroral) virtues. I can read with pleasure writers and stories who are wholly opposed to these, but I see no reason to jettison them in my own hobby-prose. (I'll put it this way. I spent the last quarter of 2012 co-writing a history of 1937, the year Buchenwald opened for business, Guernica was blitzed, the Rape of Shanghai occurred, Chamberlain became PM, and All That. Damned if I'll write misery for fun: that's my 'day job'.)
Writers with strong voices - I really do think 'tells' is the wrong notion entirely - don't, I think, suffer, but rather benefit, from being recognisable (e.g., Noe, Femme, Brammers, and a host of others). After all, we go back again and again, as readers, to GKC or Tolkien or Sayers or Conan Doyle or Miss Read or Barbara Pym, not because we don't recall How It Ended or Who Done It, but rather for the atmosphere, the scene, the world, the characters who have become our friends.
JIM Stewart, both as a don (Student of Christ Church, in fact) and as the detective-story writer Michael Innes, had his stock phrases and foreseeable grace-notes; so did Homer. I can, I confess, rather readily pastiche him or Conan Doyle or Chesterton (who was himself a brilliant pasticheur: see 'Variations on an air', http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/kingcole.html); what of it? My beloved Betjeman - well, least said, and all that. As Kipling said, 'there are nine-and-sixty' (ooo, Missus! Titter ye not!) 'ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right' (http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_neolithic.htm); which being so, we're all ploughing the same ground in any case.
I believe your story will tell you how it is to be built, if only you listen; that is all on earth we know, and all we need to know (http://englishhistory.net/keats/poetry/odeonagrecianurn.html).
My tuppence-two-penn'orth, there (bloody decimalisation: 2p indeed. Rubbish).
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You call them tells.
Date: 2012-12-21 06:52 pm (UTC)Writers with strong voices - I really do think 'tells' is the wrong notion entirely - don't, I think, suffer, but rather benefit, from being recognisable (e.g., Noe, Femme, Brammers, and a host of others). After all, we go back again and again, as readers, to GKC or Tolkien or Sayers or Conan Doyle or Miss Read or Barbara Pym, not because we don't recall How It Ended or Who Done It, but rather for the atmosphere, the scene, the world, the characters who have become our friends.
JIM Stewart, both as a don (Student of Christ Church, in fact) and as the detective-story writer Michael Innes, had his stock phrases and foreseeable grace-notes; so did Homer. I can, I confess, rather readily pastiche him or Conan Doyle or Chesterton (who was himself a brilliant pasticheur: see 'Variations on an air', http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/kingcole.html); what of it? My beloved Betjeman - well, least said, and all that. As Kipling said, 'there are nine-and-sixty' (ooo, Missus! Titter ye not!) 'ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right' (http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_neolithic.htm); which being so, we're all ploughing the same ground in any case.
I believe your story will tell you how it is to be built, if only you listen; that is all on earth we know, and all we need to know (http://englishhistory.net/keats/poetry/odeonagrecianurn.html).
My tuppence-two-penn'orth, there (bloody decimalisation: 2p indeed. Rubbish).