Modern fiction has been offending many on a regular basis. Religious provocation, ideological sports, cultural cunningness and so on… modern authors know many tricks to trigger the sensitive parts of the body called society and thus, they can manage to sell their works of fiction to many readers who, otherwise, could not have known about the work. While this is a good trick and works most of the time, many new authors try to play smart and become national bestsellers by the morning. However, it doesn’t work like that. Propaganda is not that simple to be implemented in fiction if you are a novice. No. You cannot sell this pen if you are a new seller!
Historically, jargon is the companion of authors who are popular. If you are a novice and you use jargon to camouflage your content, in an attempt to make it subtle, you will fail, most likely! I have read many new authors who, in an attempt to look stylish with their sentences and writing, try to over-drive their details for things that might be utterly unnecessary in the grand scheme of things. And hence, they fail!
If you witness the works by Lawrence Sterne or Thomas Hardy, you will notice there is too much between the text and the context. The readers, to an extent, enjoy this hiatus and also the kind of language that these authors used. There is more to be given to the aura of such authors as so-called classic writers and that adds too much to the weight of their literary works more than anything else. If you remove the name of the author from the works of James Joyce, I bet there will not be a reader who will take time to read the work completely because the ego to read a classic author will be removed from the offerings… No one wants to read crooked writing by new authors. And so, authors of the day should focus on keeping things straight and as simple as possible. The complexity of content might eliminate their chances of being read by a mass audience.
Authors such as Chetan Bhagat and Amish Tripathi and the lowly soft-porn writers like Shobha De are popular because they don’t twist their content too much. It is another thing that they don’t have anything to twist and shape in literary shapes because their ultimate motive is offering the readers a simple story with some spicy sex and ‘illicit affair’ box checked. Those who are new and have some literary shame, please try to be simple and also creative, try to be something in between Chetan Bhagat and Amitav Ghosh – yes, you can follow the footsteps of Aravind Adiga and taste the fruit of literary success!
by Gunjan for Intellectual Reader