The provincialism of modern novelists

I’ve penned a guest post for 2 Blowhards on a subject I know all too much about – literature. An excerpt:

Anyone involved in the world of literature is aware of the old cliché, “Write what you know.” There’s an unstated implication in that phrase; make sure what you know is interesting. The best novelists had no trouble grasping this concept. Ernest Hemingway only wrote what he knew, but the breadth and depth of his life experiences – fighting in World War I, living in Paris during the Roaring Twenties, reporting on the Spanish Civil War – was a large part of what made his novels compelling. Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (as well as his other works) was a glorified retelling of his experiences during WWI and later working in colonial French West Africa and the U.S. The list of great novelists who infused their writing with their varied life experiences is endless: F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski, Tim O’Brien, etc.

Read over there, comment there or here. Many thanks to Donald Pittenger for allowing me this opportunity.