Aha - So This Sort of Thing is Possible

Weather a novel by Jenny Offill, has opened my writer's eyes and renewed my writer's hope.

Sometimes my increasingly insistent "Voice" and my slow but stubborn developing "Craft" have loud arguments with each other. They fight, they sulk and walk away, sometimes they wake the neighbours. 

"This is the right way to do it," Craft says, "You know the contest editors will tell you that was the wrong way." 

"Ah, but it's not me," Voice says, "It doesn't produce the, I don't know, the tone, the emotional reaction, the ambiance, the something-or-other I'm after. I know it's awkward, but it's true, and for right now it's the best I can do."

Here is a typical positive comment about Weather from Goodreads:

"I loved every minute of Weather. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, thanks to the choppy style, specific brand of humour and refusal to deliver conventional narrative movement, but I thought it was brilliant."

And a not-so-positive one:
"I don't think this is a bad book at all, I want to make that clear right away.  I think Jenny Offill is a talented writer, and that she achieves everything she set out to achieve with this little book . . . But with that said... I didn't particularly like it?  I mostly found this book incredibly forgettable . . . and there was nothing about Lizzie's story in particular that justified to me why this was the particular story that Offill chose to tell."

And one that, I suspect, represents the broader world of creative storytellers and reviewers:
"This is not an easy book to review . . . 
My guess is that readers will either appreciate and enjoy it ...
Or ....
They won’t."

My point for newish and renewing writers is not to grab a copy of this particular novel -- it may hold zero inspiration for you -- but that out there somewhere there may well be an example of something you have been wandering around in circles, striving for, but not being able to explain what it is. To others or even to yourself.

When, suddenly, there it is. Maybe not exactly but close enough. An example of the possible.

In short, keep writing, yes. But keep reading too.