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/lit/ - Literature

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10317042 No.10317042 [Reply] [Original]

I've been writing for a while. I like realist fiction. It seems impossible to write like that. It seems genuinely impossible to just write a compelling story about two people doing fairly normal things. The Bible is easy to read, but Raymond Corver is like magic to me.
How?
How does one turn something mundane into something interesting?

>> No.10317077

Neat article by James Wood in a recent New Yorker about Jon McGregor, who writes novels about places rather than people, sweeping the narrative along the street peaking his head into windows and following people up stairs down alleys around the corner to the bar. Haven't read any of his books yet, but it seems like an interesting take on realism. Instead of placing the center of the story on any one/two/etc characters its about a community, and all the small bits that comprise it. Like, what even is morality/vengeance/values/conflict/resolution seen from a far?

>> No.10317097

>>10317077
That's interesting. Can you link the article?

>> No.10317107
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10317107

no idea

>> No.10317160

It's certainly difficult. The cliché answer would be life experience and patient writing, I guess. Corver really is the master of that sort of thing

>> No.10317705

>>10317097
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/27/the-visionary-power-of-the-novelist-jon-mcgregor


Wood a great critic. He's best known for coining the term Hyperrealism to describe that specific maximalist, throw-everything-you-know-into-a-novel, "funny" style perpetrated by DFW, Pynchon, and Zadie Smith. But the less academic stuff (like what's linked) is full of honest critique and a love of literature.