Writing fiction is a thankless endeavor - I think - really any writing at all,,, putting words out there in the world for others to read and think about and judge. To be a "best-selling" author, with hundreds and thousands of people buying (as Kai was told, "nicht geraucht, sonder gekauft!") and then judging your stuff...
I recently have been reading fictional essais by a couple of former clients of mine (two who I genuinely enjoyed as humans and who I felt might actually have some insight and understanding as to what at least part of the human condition was all about^), while also reading a few parallel novels by more established writers (or at least more universally accepted books in the book and adaptation world...)
I have long been a student of literature (and I guess humanity?) - but my interest I think was always really about understanding the disparity between 1) Human Experience, which is (I think) an idiosyncratic, personal, and (possibly) unshareable experience [and a small aside here, but I think this is quite fundamental - I'm not saying that we as humans can't share our experience, but that the overall total version of our worldview may be different for each and every one of us {kind of like the what if when I see blue, other people are seeing red...} and this separation may in fact be the source of our larger inability to cohabitate on earth.] and that of 2) Human Expression, I'll admit, my initial bias here has always been through the written (and sorta spoken) word, but this is everyone's expression of musical, conversational, comedic, artistic(al?), filmic, poetical, historical, sociological, personal...
This may shock you, but I am a very judgmental reader - I think of things pretty harshly as very well written, not very well written, horribly written, etc.. I am simultaneously a voraciously omnivorous reader, willing to read not only across almost any genre, but also any quality. I love bad writing almost as much as I like good writing - certainly I have learned a lot more from bad writing than good. It's a lot easier to identify what exactly is bad in bad writing (and thereby try to excise it from your own writing) than it is to identify what exactly makes good writing good - it's all good or great, but what is it, exactly, that they just did there?
In conversation with my wife about "needing a new book", I have tried to have her parse out a bit what it is she is looking for in a great reading experience, and she framed it this way:
"I don't like it when writers are writing obscurely, just for the sake of being obscure. Neither do I like it, though (this isn't really how she talks), when writers just come out and say what they mean, like Stephen King (she's not a fan), he has a thought, and then he just writes it right out there for everyone to see. I want a writer to couch (clearly, this is me, but I am summarizing her) their point within their prose a bit, but not to be too obscure."
A couple of recent examples of books that fit this bill that she (and subsequently I) both really enjoyed are Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr and The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern. Clearly she likes a little bit of magical realism too, and it certainly helps for a book to be about books, too... In both of these example books, the reader feels a bit adrift in the early going, wondering just what is going on, and how the disparate chapters &* characters might fit together with one another, and what it all amounts to.
Another book that we both recently read (this one my choice, rather than hers) was The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (which I have just learned is also alternately titled The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, which is exceedingly strange to me). This book, though not about books, was largely satisfactory to Brooke's books* criteria up until the very end, when the author, one Stuart Turton, comes out and tells us just precisely what's been going on here. I still quite liked the book, and highly recommend it, although it did feel a bit M. Night Shylaman-y there at the end.
Another book I read recently that purports to be about a strange, scary phenomenon happening in the sewers (among other places) of a fictional small town near the coast was Phantoms, by Dean Koontz, and man-oh-man does he shit the bed whilst fully explaining the phenomenon that has been haunting the town with a "scientifically viable" (he assures us in the author's note afterward) account of what the characters discover. And this is not remotely the worst part of this book. While the similarly summarizable* novel, It, has seven kids at the center of it who we get to know and care about, there is exactly nobody in Koontz' novel to care about and so the story has no stakes. I think this is because the characters, rather than acting like (or being) thinking, feeling humans, are more akin to walking talking resumes of humans (or maybe they're more like LinkedIn profiles). So too in those novels by my clients, never, anywhere in them, do I get a sense that anyone remotely real is nearby the narratives.
It Happens in the Hamptons is a (sometimes shockingly) tawdry novel of manners set within the Old Money / New Money / No Money world of the Hamptons, but despite the constant crashing together of characters from widely differing backgrounds nothing ever really feels at stake, I think because all of the characters really feel more like summaries of backgrounds, rather than anyone who resembles
The Last Ember is a (sometimes shockingly)* Jewish clone of The Da Vinci Code where every character who enters any scene is literally handing everyone else in the room their resume^^.
And, even after all that effort of putting words to page, you find my surely-soon-to-be-defunct blog that is drawing more attention to your prosal* efforts, never quite coming out and saying anything, just commenting on it all, generally negatively.
*sigh*^^^
^After several occasions meeting both of them it became eminently clear that neither of them in fact did, but it was also obvious that it was very important to both of their senses of self that I thought that they did (even though it was also obvious that in their account of the world what I thought mattered not at all). In fact in all of my decade plus at MPS I only ever encountered one single client who seemed to have any insight into this at all).
* Then there's me, who uses an Ampersand just because the "ch" sounds in two neighboring words are different, and that's fun to draw them a bit closer, or uses unnecessary words in sentences to make fun rhymes (both literal and thematic) happen, or creating words that should be (but probably aren't).
^^No, they aren't.
^^^These asterisk brackets are unrelated to the previous footnote usage of the asterisks earlier in this post, and any similarities are incidental^^.
