Our writing group has been workshopping novels for three years and we've all gotten so sophisticated about craft that nobody writes anything risky anymore. We give each other technically perfect feedback about technically competent pages, and I can feel all of us shrinking into what we think good novels should be instead of discovering what our novels want to become.
More people experience this than they realize.
Collective expertise can calcify into a shared conservatism that inhibits the very experimentation novels require.
“Where Are You with The novel — form and possibility?”
If this sounds familiar, the Library can help you find the bigger picture.