In a fast-moving digital world, where CGI and
3d can create and transport us to environments and worlds we previously had to
use our own imaginations to visit, I am not sure anything has yet been created
with a greater power to move than the written word.
Throughout the last couple of
centuries time and again writers have successfully peeled back the veneer of
society and cast a light on things that have disturbed us, shamed us, empowered
us and, often by revealing the power of the human spirit at the same time,
moved us. The thought of a society without To Kill A Mockingbird highlighting
the racial injustice of America in the xxxxs is inconceivable. How clear would
be our knowledge of Victorian England, the poverty and the hardships, without
Dickens and his searing descriptions of Victorian workhouses? What reveals more
about our ability to become feral than Golding’s Lord of the Flies?
And more latterly works like The Lovely Bones, We Need To
Talk About Kevin and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the
Night Time have enhanced our understanding the human condition but in
a way that has never been at the expense of the intent to entertain. The two
are not and should not be mutually exclusive.
This is how I like to write. I enjoy the challenge of taking ordinary people and placing them in extraordinary situations and then working through the process of how they – and therefore how I - would react if confronted by such extremes.
Sometimes, though, we may not want to open a window onto our world; we want instead to find an escape route from it. And here again great writing has the capacity to transport us. The likes of Rowling, Pratchett, Tolkein and others have created worlds away from our own where, through the power of their imaginations and subsequently our own, we have been able to build parallel worlds for us to inhabit in our minds. Subsequently, of course, movie adaptations have removed from us the responsibility of viewing those worlds purely through our own mind's eye but that merely reflects the the undeniable fact that the source of all entertainment is the power of great writing.
So I am firmly in the camp that breadth is best. As with music, where I don't believe that rock is better than pop, or soul better than rap, I only believe there is good music. The same is true of books. Whatever the genre, whatever the story, no-one approach is supreme: there is merely great writing and less great writing and all Brit Writers strive to be in the former. The beauty and the beast of it, of course, is that it is never us who decides whether we have achieved it.
By Howard Robinson
This is how I like to write. I enjoy the challenge of taking ordinary people and placing them in extraordinary situations and then working through the process of how they – and therefore how I - would react if confronted by such extremes.
Sometimes, though, we may not want to open a window onto our world; we want instead to find an escape route from it. And here again great writing has the capacity to transport us. The likes of Rowling, Pratchett, Tolkein and others have created worlds away from our own where, through the power of their imaginations and subsequently our own, we have been able to build parallel worlds for us to inhabit in our minds. Subsequently, of course, movie adaptations have removed from us the responsibility of viewing those worlds purely through our own mind's eye but that merely reflects the the undeniable fact that the source of all entertainment is the power of great writing.
So I am firmly in the camp that breadth is best. As with music, where I don't believe that rock is better than pop, or soul better than rap, I only believe there is good music. The same is true of books. Whatever the genre, whatever the story, no-one approach is supreme: there is merely great writing and less great writing and all Brit Writers strive to be in the former. The beauty and the beast of it, of course, is that it is never us who decides whether we have achieved it.
By Howard Robinson
The Unofficial 'Brit Writers and Writers Everywhere' blog.
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