Too much contemporary fiction seems purposefully to address small things in small ways. And yet why not try for the all-inclusive, the gripping, for the audacious?
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
One of the things the novel can do is address big questions in ways that are accessible to people. It's not that I want to teach people, but these are the things that interest me, and this is my medium for exploring ideas, and I think the potential of novels to do that is massive.
Fiction is able to encompass books that are bleak and which dwell on the manifold and terrible problems of our times. But I don't think that all books need to have that particular focus.
Fiction connects: past and present; the great and the small; the surface with the depths. Fiction brings out the innermost, invisible springs of life that cannot be revealed in factual narratives.
I don't read a great deal of fiction, to my shame, other than the classics.
But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it.
What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence - gender, race, class or age. Those moments of transcendence when we exclaim 'You know exactly what I mean!' depend for much of their force on the anonymous character of the intimacy between writer and reader.
One reason we love fiction is because stories have a comforting shape. They provide a resolution that's lacking in our regular lives.
Fiction is too beautiful to be about just one thing. It should be about everything.
Fiction demands structures and recognizable shapes. Big surprises only draw attention to the writer's hand.
I do truly believe that the smallest stories can wind up being the biggest because it's through the specific that a writer can best access the universal.