Literary Fiction and its Need

Today’s writers have to write for markets rather than from their inner beings. Literary fiction still holds the key for inner expression.
In life, at work, from relationships, we naturally want more and more and wish to deliver the minimum possible in return which will keep us going. In the life of an author, the same holds good. We want much with little input; millions for each story we tell and sell. We spend as much time, if not more, on strategizing, creating platforms and using extraneous aids as we do on writing because getting published is akin to living up to the market’s needs. Today, an author is no longer expected to go inwards, into the depths of their being. They need to know how to produce what will sell.
The twenty-first century is very largely different from the twentieth and earlier centuries in that it has changed us, making us live lives that lack emotional depth. We have become deeper professionally or as sales persons. Our computers manage most of what we earlier fetched from within ourselves. The inward movement, even in writers, rarely matches the deep insights of writers living a century ago. The process which began in the nineteenth century, and which was noticed by poets like Matthew Arnold, has now gone much further and hardened like the shell of a tortoise. Arnold lamented the hollowness of the world and pointed to the need to depend on our very dear partners and friends:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

The literary author, if he is not running too fast for the market’s sake, provides us with that depth which he or she ferrets out from the soul intuitively. When I wrote INTRIGUING WOMEN my intuition kept bringing me to ways I could help women by presenting situations in which they could find themselves. So, in the twenty-three stories, there are so many situations in which women struggle with their circumstances. These stories take the reader to settings in which choices must be made and decisions taken and my intriguing women take these decisions, right or wrong.