Allan Guthrie wrote:
I don't really think of books as having a single worldview
unless they're written from a single point of view.
**************
I don't necessarily associate the worldview of a book with
the views of a first person narrator.
miker
Exactly right. I'm afraid I haven't got a lot of patience
with this school of anti-marxist, anti-intellectual literary
theory as often practised by crime novelists generally, and
British ones in particular, that basically sums up as 'don't
blame me I only work here'.
Of course, as a writer myself, I create characters who are
not me and they say things I wouldn't say and do things I
wouldn't do, and of course some of those things they say and
do aren't things I'd planned for them to say and do. But
taken as a whole I'm quite sure my books reflect my world
view. I do have some idea of what territory I'm heading into,
and inevitably that's territory I want to head into,
otherwise I'm not sure why I would bother do it.
Or, at least, the only reason I can see to go into territory
that doesn't speak to your personal
obsessions/interests/world view is if you're writing purely
in the hope of pleasing a market, in which case you're a hack
(there are of course plenty of very good hacks who cater for
a market very skilfully - they're just not in the business of
writing literature). And most of Al's example of writing
without a world view are examples of hack work. Thus I 'd
suggest that You Play The Black... is a work of literature
that reflects Hallass's world view, while Lassie is hackwork
that doesn't
In general I think the process of writing a non-hack novel
for a writer is one of self discovery. You start with a sense
that there's an aspect of life you want to know more about,
you write a book that gets in there, and some time, maybe
years later, you can look at that book and kind of see that
that-there-on-the-page is your world view.
What grabs me in a writer's work is that same sense that the
writer is stretching themselves - taking their world view
into territory that interests them, and seeing what
results.
John, wondering whether his horse isn't a bit high.
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