Especially in the crime fiction world, you hear a lot of crap from writers about technique. Draw the reader in. Make him love that protagonist. Make her hate that villain. Make them care. OK, not all of it is crap, but I find it oppressive. Anyone would think writing is not a solitary thing.
Anyway, this is all just a means of pointing you towards this interview with James Kelman, who is lumbered with no such self-consciousness:
"I never bothered about alienating readers, neither then nor now. The priority was to write the story properly. The readers could take care of themselves."
2 comments:
Thank you for the article link. Sometimes we try so hard to please the reader we forget to please our characters.
This interview made for fascinating reading. What an interesting old bastard!!! I noticed Anne Stevenson's name came up. She used to go round to my father-in-law's (Ken Gladdish Professor of Politics, Reading Uni)house in Reading for dinner every other week!! What a small world!
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