Fifty or sixty years ago TV was generally considered a Bad Thing by teachers and parents who wanted their children to succeed in life, a distraction preventing them getting on with their homework and reading improving books. There were even some parents who refused to have a television in the house, and when they finally cracked they were at pains to stress (though their noses grew a couple of inches as they said it) that they only bought a TV for the news and current affairs programmes. They were right to be worried, but it turned out that TV could be like a car: dangerous in the hands of the reckless but useful for getting from A to B. It could even be useful for educational purposes and for widening children’s horizons.
Had it not been for a TV serial adaptation of Oliver Twist when I was ten, I might never have read Dickens. I was so haunted by the story that I borrowed the book, and when The Old Curiosity Shop was serialised the following year I read that book too. More disturbing for the adults around me was my fondness for Coronation Street, which began around that time. There were other soaps but the early critic in me spotted that this was different. This was real drama, alive, witty and somehow true. In those days there were tragedies alongside the humour but plots rarely strayed too far beyond the plausible. Because it was a soap it was often sneered at by the pretentious, but later the merits of those early Coronation Street years have been widely accepted, and several leading UK dramatists have willingly acknowledged their debt to its creator, Tony Warren.
Competition is usually a good thing as it keeps creators on their toes, but it was to be competition that would destroy the unique charm of Coronation Street. Other soaps came onto the scene and, because they did not possess the skill to transfer the humour and pathos of everyday life into entertainment, they opted for big bangs and extremes instead. The likes of Brookside and later EastEnders brought a different kind of soap, where gangsters, cruelty and murder, even mass murder, became regular story lines. As the audience received ever more nastiness they came to need a bigger and bigger fix. Coronation Street was forced to adapt and all but destroyed its essence in the process. Blood now regularly flows on those same cobbles where Elsie Tanner and Ena Sharples once had their magnificent slanging matches.
And it now seems to me that literature could be going the same way as the extreme takes over from style as a measure of merit, indeed I have heard disturbing reports of aspiring writers being encouraged to forget individual style and go for what agents want, which seems to be very plain writing and ever more ludicrous story lines. Three or four times recently I have come across people in writers groups who have been on some writing course or other where they have been virtually forbidden to use any formula or syntax that supposedly violates the norms expected in particular genres. Not that all advice should be ignored, but does a warning about too many adjectives and adverbs really have to translate into a cull of most adjectives and adverbs? Perhaps those who run these courses (assuming they do know something about literature) do not mean such strictures to be taken literally, but some of the more timid punters who have paid for the advice seem to think they must follow such rules to the letter. Their timidity is understandable, given the difficulty of getting anything published, but in literature to stifle one’s style can involve stifling one’s art.
But, I have been told, I don’t understand the ‘genre fiction’ industry. Uniformity of style (ie one that caters for the lowest common denominator, most likely aged about fourteen) is a prerequisite. Plain cooking is the order of the day when it comes to the writing, ever more dramatic plots are what count. A disaster that wipes out a whole galaxy has got to be better than one that merely wipes out a planet, beautiful or original writing just doesn’t come into it. And there could be some truth in that. An accomplished and original writing style cannot be summed-up in a one-page synopsis (which is what an agent really likes), whereas the destruction of the universe can be.
Had it not been for a TV serial adaptation of Oliver Twist when I was ten, I might never have read Dickens. I was so haunted by the story that I borrowed the book, and when The Old Curiosity Shop was serialised the following year I read that book too. More disturbing for the adults around me was my fondness for Coronation Street, which began around that time. There were other soaps but the early critic in me spotted that this was different. This was real drama, alive, witty and somehow true. In those days there were tragedies alongside the humour but plots rarely strayed too far beyond the plausible. Because it was a soap it was often sneered at by the pretentious, but later the merits of those early Coronation Street years have been widely accepted, and several leading UK dramatists have willingly acknowledged their debt to its creator, Tony Warren.
Competition is usually a good thing as it keeps creators on their toes, but it was to be competition that would destroy the unique charm of Coronation Street. Other soaps came onto the scene and, because they did not possess the skill to transfer the humour and pathos of everyday life into entertainment, they opted for big bangs and extremes instead. The likes of Brookside and later EastEnders brought a different kind of soap, where gangsters, cruelty and murder, even mass murder, became regular story lines. As the audience received ever more nastiness they came to need a bigger and bigger fix. Coronation Street was forced to adapt and all but destroyed its essence in the process. Blood now regularly flows on those same cobbles where Elsie Tanner and Ena Sharples once had their magnificent slanging matches.
And it now seems to me that literature could be going the same way as the extreme takes over from style as a measure of merit, indeed I have heard disturbing reports of aspiring writers being encouraged to forget individual style and go for what agents want, which seems to be very plain writing and ever more ludicrous story lines. Three or four times recently I have come across people in writers groups who have been on some writing course or other where they have been virtually forbidden to use any formula or syntax that supposedly violates the norms expected in particular genres. Not that all advice should be ignored, but does a warning about too many adjectives and adverbs really have to translate into a cull of most adjectives and adverbs? Perhaps those who run these courses (assuming they do know something about literature) do not mean such strictures to be taken literally, but some of the more timid punters who have paid for the advice seem to think they must follow such rules to the letter. Their timidity is understandable, given the difficulty of getting anything published, but in literature to stifle one’s style can involve stifling one’s art.
But, I have been told, I don’t understand the ‘genre fiction’ industry. Uniformity of style (ie one that caters for the lowest common denominator, most likely aged about fourteen) is a prerequisite. Plain cooking is the order of the day when it comes to the writing, ever more dramatic plots are what count. A disaster that wipes out a whole galaxy has got to be better than one that merely wipes out a planet, beautiful or original writing just doesn’t come into it. And there could be some truth in that. An accomplished and original writing style cannot be summed-up in a one-page synopsis (which is what an agent really likes), whereas the destruction of the universe can be.