A Very Serious Man: My Journey in Writing Fiction, Part One
I used to see myself as an all-too-serious writer when it came to writing fiction. I always tried to write what in the past would have been considered the Great American Novel or those very serious stories that people would read in The New Yorker or The American Mercury . Apparently, I thought of myself as a modernist 1920s-1950s writer telling stories about characters in the vein of Gertrude Stein or J.D. Salinger, exploring the foibles of normal people. I slowly realized that my writing style is close to this vision but not in the way I thought. I am improving my process by writing earthy stories full of humor and straightforward storylines, covering the daily adventures of normal people. I really have no ambitions to write the Great American Novel anymore because I would rather write for myself and the average fiction reader. I am becoming more comfortable in my skin as a writer. The narrative structures I was creating in more fiction were far different; in fact, I was dabbling...