What Are Your Writing Boundaries

When readers want blood

Photo by Gabor Monori on Unsplash

I’ve written here before about the fiction of Ruth Ozeki, and how it’s magical and emotional. She works with large casts of characters, and with time and space in the most glorious ways.

So I was astonished to read the New York Times review of All Over Creation, Ozeki’s second novel, in which the reviewer wanted more of the characters. The reviewer, Claire Dederer’s, exact words were:

We don’t get to know the characters as well as we ought.

As a writer I was both blown away and moved by just how deeply Ozeki had gotten inside the plethora of people who populate the 417 pages. The novel is already long enough. We go deeply into all the main characters, many of the secondary, and even a goodly number of those I’d consider tertiary. What was Dederer asking of Ozeki? I know some of those characters better than friends I’ve had for years.