I've been reading the LM Montgomery e-books recently. No other author makes me want to write, and yet despair of writing quite so much as she does.
In the first place, she's a woman, and she's writing well. But she also writes in a way that seems acheivable. The Brontes don't have this quality; they seem to belong to quite another time. But, even though Anne of Green Gables is coming upon a century, Montgomery's characters don't seem so foreign and stiff: they seem like us.
I read the books and think that this is something I could do. Everything happening in the books sound like the stories of my own life, stories I try to tell. She's got a much better knack of description than I do, but so do all the author's of that period. How curious that in a world of television we have become less concerned with learning what things look like.
I wonder if those things are related: a desire, in reading, to decide for ourselves what things look like instead of being shown or told.
Anyway, the Emily series in particular seems to be less a story and more a biography, at least as far as literary concerns go. And that is where I begin to despair. Over and over again Emily the heroine sends out MSS to magazines and publishers and, yes, she gets rejections, but she also gets published.
Maybe this isn't the way things are done anymore, but if not, how is it done and how do I find out? It's the business of writing that disturbs me. What do I do after typing "The End"? Simply the knowledge that I can do things with finished work would give me the impetous to finish things.
In addition to this I would love a critic, especially as I am the only one I have ever had. I want someone who can tell me what I need to work on, generally. I want to know whether I tend to have giant flaws, things that simply ought not to occur in literature.
Though I tend to confer with ee cummings that "whoever pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you", I've got someone to kiss me, that was easy. My syntax, on the other hand, suffers.