Re: Dragging my feet about the ending

Nicky wrote:

Oh - did you not make changes in the light of people's comments?

Of course I did -- I may be stubborn but I'm not stupid.

If you didn't then you could, as I sort of assumed you had. If you
didn't agree with them, then of course you just keep resubmitting.
I sometimes find that once I have fixed a particular problem
( usually at the behest of my editor) something else that worked fine
before also needs changing, but this might just be me as I have no
gift at all for revision.

Tinker, that's what I do. I don't think it's problems at that level which mean I get no takers. Perhaps it's the story itself -- e.g. a man reaching the end of his career, a woman seeking a friend, the man with a lost daughter in the past, these things are universals which people of empathy can get into, but geocaching, an interest in Depression detective literature? You have to be a certain type to get those and a 29 year-old successful agent is not going to empathise with either, not having the learnt experience or the inclination. I think it's deeper than trivial things like 'move this character there, delete this infodump there': it's a world view problem.

Sometimes I write things that hit deep levels within myself, sometimes I miss, but to feel that impact, a jolt of recognition, pity, love, these are what makes writing worthwhile, that make the adventure with the fabulator almost worth doing regardless. Almost.

Duty, I write about duty, about self-sacrifice, of commitment to another deep enough to take the spike, of the glues that hold society together. Buchan would understand, Kipling, even Golding, but it's a world that's gone, forgotten, left behind in the pursuit of individual gain and self-advancement, reaching for the peaks and the devil take the hindmost. I hated, with a passion, the amoral heroes of cyber-punk, those empty bags of self-seeking desire. Even Jinks Hammer, who killed people for laughs, ended up saving the universe when I expanded him to a novel. The idea that the world is about self is a young man's game, and the idea that it's all about doing the heavy lifting is a boring game indeed. Someone has to pick up the bodies when the hero has gone to his penthouse with the temporary crumpet*, but no-one wants to read about them.

It's a recurrent theme: I've even done it as a song....**

Engagement. I engage with different things.

I think I'll go and plant garlic.

JF
*There we go again -- the 60s, the decade when this all started. Bond as a hero? He's ill, in social terms, but it's easy to make him admirable to unformed minds.

**Middle-aged, middle-class protest song. Let's pretend it matters, let's pretend we care, if we don't play the game of let's pretend, we'll find there's nothing there. Horatio didn't go to save Rome on a diet of drug-fuelled hedonism, his myths were of duty and honour: we write the myths for today and the ones we write are wrong.
.

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