I want to respond to a blog post I read today by the literary agent Nathan Bransford entitled ‘undercooking a novel’ who comments about how a writer’s task is not to represent life “as its actually happen” for as he assert “we have, well, real life for that”. Instead Bransford’s stand is that a writer’s task is to “elevate life and add spices and all the rest. Writers interpret real life, elevate it, reorder events, and serve up something perfectly balanced and ready for public consumption."
I see his point. As he says at the end of his discussion “serving up raw life on the page without cooking it is like putting a beet on a plate and saying dinner is served.” I love vegetables and we usually have two dishes of vege with any meal at home, but raw beet – hmmm, I don’t think so.
Having said that, ‘rawness’ in representation of art has a place.
Yes, there is a need for the author to, “spice it up” a little and create a world that engages and captures our imagination, thus we have for instance the fantasy and science fiction genres which help us suspend our disbelieve long enough to engage with the made up world that the writers create, think Avatar if you must. However, there is also realism which sets out to represent life as lived and engages the reader to reconsider life from the author's perspective.
The very fact that there are different genres of fiction asserts to the fact that writings and writers have a divergent sense of life around them and they set out to represent it as they choose with the hope, i'm sure, to find readers who can connect to their narrative. To limit literary representation to any one mode is to limit the representation of life in art.
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