SIZE DOESN’T MATTER
Don’t worry whether the themes are big or small, just write your story, says Adrian Magson
In an interview in October’s WM, Sebastian Faulks claimed he didn’t see the point in ‘small themes’ as subjects, preferring ‘love, war and what it means to be human’.
Nor, he continued, did he want to ‘waste three years of my life, and two or three reading days of a reader’s life, on small beer’.
Personally, as a reader, I like to choose how I waste my time, small beer or not. It’s mine after all. I like to be entertained, whether reading fiction, non-fiction or sauce bottles.
And I wouldn’t call my normal reading matter small anything. (Nor, I suggest, would any of the authors be too keen on hearing it.) If the reading matter entertains me and takes me out of myself, and along the way educates me as well on whatever the subject matter might be, I’m very grateful for that. Life is indeed short – as SF acknowledges – and how we live it is down to each one of us.