Comments on: City Mouse, Country Mouse

By: Anne Stuart

Anne Stuart — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 18:57:12 +0000

I moved from NYC to a town of 500 to write my first novel. 40 years later I’m still here, and the population has only grown to 700.
I love New York for the energy. My mind goes like a subway, clacking along at great speed. For me, the city is great for the mind and work. Not so good for the soul.
In a perfect world I’d have an apartment in NYC where I could go to write for long periods, then go back to my life in the country. But then, I always was a woman of extremes. I’d say I’d write darker books if I lived in the city full time, but I don’t think I could get much darker.

By: DBurks

DBurks — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 03:01:49 +0000

I am impressed that you noticed the essential difference. So many people are locked into their personal experience and refuse to notice anything else. I live in the country on a farm surrounded by extensive forest on the north bank of a scenic river not far from an interstate highway. Every summer there are about four drownings in the river of city folk on small craft, rafts and inner tubes. There is usually at least one fatality and several rescues every winter of people hiking in the forest in the same clothing they wear to a shopping mall. Their minds are just too small and closed to grasp that the world is a big place, and their past experience might not apply.

I do have a literary complaint: Editors and publishers are really quite pitiful when it comes to rural and wilderness details. Country life and small town affairs are usually just cartoons based on a few urban assumptions that have never been accurate. And dialog never ever reflects the fact that education long ago reached the edge of the wilderness. I suspect that no matter what the author writes the editors want revisions to reflect their prejudices.

Many people read to experience places they could never go so why not give them an authetic experience? How can I trust the details in The Kite Runner about Afghanistan or other exotic places when the details of the nearby countryside are seldom genuine?

So, for all you agents, editors and publishers, get out more often. Expand your horizons. If the drive through New Jersey was noteworthy imagine going to Oklahoma or Idaho and leaving the highway.

By: Donn

Donn — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 19:25:38 +0000

I like that distinction between city and countryside – that the city is all about interactions between other people.

Cities are way too anthropocentric. Sometimes it’s good to be thrust into places where humanity plain isn’t.

By: Christi Goddard

Christi Goddard — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 17:47:56 +0000

There was a book I adored when I was seventeen (which I won’t name here) and I read repeatedly my senior year, checking it out from the school library whenever my grace period ran out. It’s out of print now, but I found it online and was thrilled when it arrived in the mail. It’s not the same. It was an adult novel, and read through my teenage eyes it was amazing and exciting. Twenty years later, after working on honing my own craft, I found the character two-dimensional, the dialogue boring, and the metaphors tired. Sometimes I think I was happier as a reader.

I’ve crossed that fence from reader to writer, and sometimes the view is depressing. But, happily, on my journey to absorb all manner of prose, I’ve been more able to enjoy a well-written book than I would have otherwise, pausing to absorb a line and let it resonate with me like it was my own thought and had simply forgotten it.