20 June 2019
I'm currently reading "Darkness Visible" by William Golding, and part-way into it one of the most important Tips I put together for Sharnie came to mind...
Tip No 13 - The money or the acclaim?
William Golding (British, 1911-1993) is, to my mind, the classic example of writing from the heart, not the head - not doing it for the money but doing it for the literary acclaim. Golding is a perfect example of someone who wrote what HE wanted to write, not what he clinically thought might sell well in the commercial book climate of the day.
This is my third Golding novel, and while "The Inheritors" is still my fave, it's clear that each one of his books is very different in theme and style - they were each simply what HE wanted to write. His very first novel, in 1954 when he was 43 years old, was "Lord Of The Flies" (which I have to admit I haven't read but it's on The List) was rejected, but - so the story goes - was rescued from Faber & Faber's "slush pile" by a young editor, and was published, struggled to make sales to begin with, but went on to become a best seller, deemed one of the best 100 novels in English, and spawned a couple of movies.
He then followed it up with "The Inheritors", very different to the first in style and setting and subject, as was the string of his works that was to come, which eventually saw him with - amongst many other awards - the Booker Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and a knighthood. Serious acclaim.
So, while John Grisham and Stephen King and J. K. Rowling have made heaps more dosh than Sir William ever did, his choices of what he wanted to write worked for him. Worked pretty well in fact. And I hasten to add that I have NO idea if the three authors mentioned above wrote from the heart and just got lucky, or worked out a truly whiz-bang genre and stuck to it. And I'm not knocking either one, as each is a path that every writer consciously or unconsciously chooses somewhere in the early days of their literary life.
Cheers
T.R.E.