[QUOTE]Originally posted by Fox

[B]In my opinion, one of the greatest challenges a serious writer should take on is to make the "ordinary" interesting .

That is very well said, and I entirely agree. We've all seen thousands of sunsets and the interiors of hundreds of rooms. A writer who can make such an acquaintance memorable is one to be treasured.


Stretching reality (and I do it too) is often the easy way out.

Read the opening to Dickens "A Tale of Two Cities" as an example.

Ah -- but it was not only an epoch of belief, it was also an epoch of incredulity. Surely Dickens, as much as any great writer, was a reality-stretcher vis-a-vis character. Fagin, Jingle, Quilp, Squeers, Pecksniff, Miss Havisham, Micawber, that notorious Heep of infamy -- all of them were as much caricatures as characters. Not to mention his endlessly diverting but labyrinthian plots. From 30,000 feet Dickens is a realist writing about social problems; but from the page to the heart he piqued the reader's imagination with as unrealistic (and at times grotesque) a cast of characters as any great author has ever assembled


Isaak Denison's "I had a farm in Africa" (Out of Africa) is another. Ordinary circumstance rendered into a magnificent image.

A great artist - van Gogh, Rembrandt, etc - takes an ordinary scene and renders it into a memorable painting. Great writing does the same thing.

Even more so, Vermeer, I would say. But I'm not too sure that Thomas Hardy, that apostle of the ordinary, would find a wide following here. :-)

If the subject is fantasy - Hieronymous Bosch or Harlan Ellison - the same applies. Make the fantastic believable, make it real, make it credible. Shakespeare's ghosts are real characters to the audience because of the skill of the writing, not because ghosts exist.

"I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood."

Thanks for a thought-provoking post,

Boccaccio