Writer’s Choices
Developing a long narrative, as in a novel, involves making a number of decisions that are both tactical and strategic.
In other of the pages on this site, the elements of fiction have been discussed, and those all entail a variety of choices that a writer must make in developing a story. Taken in total, they add up to a list of tactical executions and objectives, moves a novelist makes to spin a tale.
Above all those tactical decisions are strategic decisions that may have impacts beyond the immediate concerns of the work under development.
Legitimate novelists write novels throughtout their lives, churning out one after the next. That means that they develop ouevres, libraries of their work.
Looked at as a whole, that collection reflects the author’s profile: what readers come to know and expect.
Readers and critics tend to have simplified views of novelists, developed from all the “tells” embedded in all those tactical decisions made along the way toward developing their signature style, and working within their genre.
In a mostly-conscious fashion, writers write about things, and in ways, that reflect their natural inclinations coupled with choices they make about the type of writer theh wish to be. And those choices are defining, and in a commercial world, inherently limiting. Readers seem to admire writers who have carved out a particular niche for themselves. Also, writing is not unlike the regular workplace. It is hard to sell yourself as a program manager if everything about your resume says you are an administrative assistant. Likewise, once writers have established their authenticity in a particular genre, it is rare for them to be accepted if writing outside of that genre. An established YA writer, like J.K. Rowling, may have trouble being taken seriously as a writer of adult literary fiction. Or, maybe not. You rarely see a known writer creating a work outside of what they’ve become known for.
For that reason, the serious novelist might want to take seriously those decisions around what they want their body of work to represent.