The Same Again or Different Every Time?

Terry Pratchett or George Orwell? Magnus Mills or Italo Calvino? Novelists tend to divide into two types – those writers who compose the same book, over and again, and those who write a different one each time. Familiarity or the strange? This is, then, a companion piece to my post, To read widely or read deeply?, but from the writer’s point of view this time.

There’s comfort to be drawn from reading what is essentially the same book, time after time. For myself, I derive much pleasure from reading the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett. On the face of it, no series could be more formulaic – a novel published every other year over the course of forty or so years, each with a similar title – A Family and a Fortune, A Father and His Fate and so on – all placed in a big house in that imaginary Edwardian world where an upper middle class family is  utterly consumed by the process of tearing itself to pieces. The novels consist almost exclusively of brilliantly written dialogue – barbed comment, cutting aside, snide innuendo… To be honest, if you’ve read one, you’ve read them all. And still I love them. Familiarity breeds content.

I wonder, though, how satisfying it can be, to construct the same book, over and over. Didn’t Ivy, even if only momentarily, yearn to write a thousand page experimental piece or an allegorical novella? Maybe not. There’s pressure from commercial publishers, of course, for a repeat performance. You’ve created a marketable brand with an identified target market, the elusive ‘winning formula’ or ‘cash cow’. Why kill the goose that lays the golden egg? The so-called gentleman publisher used to employ this strategy to good effect, subsidising the work of his more adventurous and consequently less popular writers from the book sales of his mainstream authors. Regrettably, in the modern, oligopolised publishing industry, such houses are few and far between.

Should the writer follow the same, familiar path?

Some of the authors whom I most admire have written oeuvres comprising radically different works, thematically, stylistically or by setting, perhaps even in all three ways. The writing of Georges Perec springs to mind. It’s a distant goal to which I aspire in my own writing. The English writer for whom I hold the greatest regard is probably William Golding (and who’s bound to be the subject of a future post). Golding’s first five published novels are inspirational, a sequence, to the best of my knowledge, unrivalled in English literature. After his best-known work, the pessimistic allegory Lord of the Flies, Golding wrote The Inheritors, his account of the extinction of the Neanderthals and then Pincher Martin, in which the eponymous anti-hero clings to a shard of rock in the middle of the ocean before sinking beneath the water. To my mind, there’s a slight dip in form with the story of damaged artist, Samuel Mountjoy in Free Fall but then comes the towering fifth novel, The Spire, that immense work of the fevered imagination, Golding’s investigation into the folly of mortal ambition. Following a period of such sustained brilliance, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Golding remained unable to write another novel for the next decade and a half. Julian Barnes, it seems to me, is another such. While my reaction to Barnes’ work is one of admiration rather than affection, and I’ve read by no means all of his output, his works strike me as markedly different in tone and style, one from another. Consider A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, Staring at the Sun and Before She Met Me. It’s a mark of his skill as a writer that they could almost have been written by three different authors.

Should the writer follow new paths, leading to unfamiliar destinations?

Such matters need hardly concern the unpublished novelist. No commercial pressures for him or her. The chance to be asked to repeat himself or herself would be a fine thing. Published or unpublished, though, those committed to writing in the long term have that body of work to consider. In the final analysis, writing is about creativity and not about making pounds or dollars. If you have aspired to produce your ideal book and have remained true to yourself, even though it might fall short and there might prove to be no ‘market’ for the finished ‘product’, that, I would argue, is the greatest achievement.

So which type of writer do you prefer, the ones who stick to the tried and trusted formula or those who branch out into something new with each work? Which approach is better? It’s a false dichotomy, of course, but an interesting one, nonetheless. And since I’ve just discovered what that roundel button on WordPress’s post writing page does, here’s your chance to have your say:

Thanks for voting!

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