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If you try to please everyone, you please no-one. Finnegan's Wake (Joyce) has gained and retained a reputation as a great classic of the English language, despite working hard at every turn to con...
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#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T06:31:04Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/28358 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
by
Chris Sunami
·
2019-12-08T06:31:04Z (almost 5 years ago)
If you try to please everyone, you please no-one. _Finnegan's Wake_ (Joyce) has gained and retained a reputation as a great classic of the English language, despite working hard at every turn to confound and confuse the reader (and arguably not even being written in real "English"). If your writing is good enough, and if you are true enough to your own personal vision, you are likely to gain at least a niche audience of passionate fans, which has been enough to keep many a book alive for centuries. Typically, books that appeal to a broad popular audience do so because their authors are naturally at home (or have found a way to make themselves at home) with a broadly popular idiom or genre, not because they have deliberately tried to "dumb down" their work. In other words, they are attuned to the broader audience, not chasing it (and certainly not condescending to it).
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2017-05-30T15:50:51Z (over 7 years ago)
Original score: 2