User: matociquala Date: 2006-12-27 02:02 (UTC) Subject: (no subject) Keyword: criminal minds reid damned spot

Whereas, if I'm not stepping on a blade, my attitude is that the story wasn't worth writing.

Which is probably the thing I find lacking in a lot of genre work: emotional truth. I find most work in our genre... disappointingly shallow.

My writing isn't autobiographical, but it certainly deals with all my squids and issues.

User: janni Date: 2006-12-27 22:35 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

But what if the story doesn't want a blade?

I mean, stepping jaggedy edges that are clearly part of the story is flinching from giving it the depth and emotional nearness it wants. But not every story has jaggedy edges, or wants them.

User: matociquala Date: 2006-12-27 22:38 (UTC) Subject: (no subject) Keyword: twain & tesla

I think even very mannered stuff is improved by the presence of fraughtness.

Fraughtness can be very understated. But I mean, if there's nothing real at risk, if there's nothing to win or lose, where is the tension?

User: jaylake Date: 2006-12-27 22:40 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

I am thinking we (the larger "we", not specifically the dual inclusive) have divergent understandings of words like "blade" and "blood" here. A story about not having enough money to pay the rent can be just as high stakes and risky as a story about having psychic worms gnawing at your tibia while dictating eschatological roadmaps.

User: janni Date: 2006-12-27 22:44 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

But so can a story about failing to impress the man you've asked out to dinner enough to get to a second date. And it could, say, do it through humor. Which may come down to different definitions of blade and blood and such. And humor can have edges, too, and some of those are sharp--but others are gentler, and that can work, too.

User: jaylake Date: 2006-12-27 22:47 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

Yah. I'm working right now on whether or not I believe there isn't always an ur-edge underneath.

User: janni Date: 2006-12-27 22:50 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

And what an edge means in the first place, yeah. I'm thinking about that, too.

User: matociquala Date: 2006-12-27 23:06 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

*g* Read Lilian Jackson Braun.

There's not an edge to be had, in her stuff.

User: matociquala Date: 2006-12-27 23:04 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

yes.

User: angelinehawkes Date: 2006-12-27 02:17 (UTC) Subject: Exposing our cores as genre writers

"about writers who had reached deep into themselves and exposed their core"

I think a lot of horror writers, and maybe fantasy writers to some extent, DO draw on their own emotions while creating fiction. I don't want to say all horror writers, but a lot of the ones I've come into contact with have overcome some sort of obstacle, often times horrific in nature, at some point in their life that they have drawn on or continue to draw on while writing horror.

Fantasy, too, can come from the need to escape something horrific from which the writer cannot or is powerless to escape from in reality. For me, it was child abuse. And religion. The 2 combined make not for a good combo. One justifies the other. It was not good.

I draw on these fears and permanent traumas in a lot of my horror work, and most of my fantasy worlds come from the ability generated even as a small child to seek a refuge and escape from the horrors I could not control.

So, even though it may seem like genre writers are only weaving fantastical tales...there may be a reason for escaping into that fantastic.

And I think a lot of what is at my core or the things that developed my core come out in my characters. If you take a look at the majority of my male characters you will start to see a pattern in my perception of men in general...they tend to follow a type that I don't strive to re-create, they just happen that way. I think that's because in my developmental years, this is how men were/are, and this is how men were shaped in my brain...so it comes out in the characters I write. My short story "Ophelia" [Eternal Night], delved into an emotional, dark place for me...and I have another tale, "What Goes Around" that I have rejected often due to content [domestic/child abuse, no one wants to touch the topic], that is dark and was very hard to write.

I think we, as genre writers, aren't so blatant about our cores being exposed in our writing...but it's there.

User: cristalia Date: 2006-12-27 02:18 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

I don't know -- I disagree that the way genre's constructed insulates us from the blade-stepping. I think in some ways genre tropes encourage that very thing. Most mainstream literature that I've been exposed to (so this'll be heavily skewed towards CanLit) lends a heavy priority to human emotion as a topic of discussion: it's very explicitly about people's squids, feelings, passions. One sees the blade. Things hurt less when you see them go in.

Genre, in not making the squids the topic, distracts you with the shiny FTL drive and then oh, look down, there is a blade fifteen inches through your chest and you're bleeding into your shirt.

Power of the sneaky and implicit. *g*

User: therinth Date: 2006-12-27 03:12 (UTC) Subject: (no subject) Keyword: blood

Every new thing i write i write because some part of me needs to explore itself. (Luckily, i seem to have a lot of issues to plumb.) I rewrote a piece Genesis as a genre novel so that i could get good with god, at least for my version of him.

Where i think genre writers bleed more than most (or perhaps this is just me, yay) is that you have to buy into the program to sell it. I have to really believe on some intrinsic level that goodness is rewarded, and after hard work and harder realities, there is some place where all my efforts will come to fruition.

It's something that i'm getting to explore particularly closely today. I hope i'm right, rather than foolhardy.

User: cpolk Date: 2006-12-27 16:40 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

me too, I hope you're right too.

User: therinth Date: 2006-12-27 19:31 (UTC) Subject: (no subject) Keyword: greenwing

thanks cpolk :)

User: jimvanpelt Date: 2006-12-27 04:45 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

Hi, Jay. When I was in grad school for a creative writing degree, a fellow student in workshop constantly was on me for writing genre work with "non-realistic" elements. Her mantra to me was, "What do you REALLY want to say? What is your REAL material?" Her position was that the fantasy or science fictional elements only distanced me from the core of my interests and power.

Of course, she was the same writer who when I met her I asked what she wrote, and she said, "Thinly veiled autobiography." I remember the first lines to a story she wrote for workshop, "It wasn't the first time. It wasn't the last time. It wasn't even the worst time." The story was about rape. I had no tools to help critique that piece. All I wanted to do was give her a hug or the number to a good therapist.

I think she said about her own writing was right about mine too, though. I write thinly veiled autobiography. I think we all do. The question is how thin is the veil?

I have noticed that the first bunch of stories I wrote required very little research. I wrote straight from my stored obsessions and thoughts. Later, after I'd worked through those, I found that more and more of my stories come from research and outside material, to my story's benefit. Still, they all feel like they're digging at my core interests, whatever it is that makes me who I am, or the story loses interest for me.

User: devonmonk Date: 2006-12-27 05:44 (UTC) Subject: (no subject) Keyword: typing happy happy!

A long time ago when I first started writing with an intent to sell, I read a quote in Writer's Digest that seemed to address this issue for me. I have since forgotten the words, but not the meaning. The meaning was that a compelling story has to have a hidden nerve--an emotional power or pain that invokes response in the reader. This hidden nerve is drawn from our own emotional life experience and placed carefully between the lines of text.

I never have written a story that isn't exploring some sort of my own pain, confusion, or life experience. I think genre makes a lovely vehicle for leaning into the blade. I think the trick is for the author to know how much bleeding is good for the author, the story, the reader's experience, and finally, the market.

So, like Jim said, for me, the blade's always there, but sometimes the veil is pretty thick.

User: floatingtide Date: 2006-12-27 08:35 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

I've written a few thin-veiled things or maybe biography wit a blanket thrown over it.

My spec-fic writing always comes from my own emotional experience, but normally any autobiography has been sealed in thick concrete -- no one will ever find the body. I think this is usual for genre writers but has little to do with how much blood we spend.

I think every genre has its ways softening the blow and also of sliding the real, raw stuff in sideways.

Literary usually does this with poetic language. Rich prose can make a story deeper, but it doesn't give it any more reality, and it can be a distancing technique as well. Modern Lit may be unique in that it -requires- that the reader smell the blood and hear the screams. If the reader isn't given the sweetened pain, then it's either mainstream or just a dud.

Mainstream books, like mainstream television, often keep all the wounds tidy by making sure the audience is comfortable in the formula, and cozily knows that none of the characters they truly care about will be hurt more than is acceptable. Steven King (though he is genre) has been very good a this -- mostly in the middle of his career. Lately, Mr. King has been leaning a lot harder into the knife. It's been interesting.

(BTW, I know mainstream and lit are sloppy, overlapping genres. I'm making generalizations, but these might apply to books in any niche).

I don't think spec-fic stays any further from the blade than other genres. Instead, it just re-contextualizes things. In some ways this allows both reader and authors to pierce subjects that otherwise would be too heavily armored to get the knife into. In the past it's been things like gender and racial issues, but I think it doesn't have to be so big.

Pain and fear might be easier to accept if it comes from a alien or vampire. The emotions can sneak past the border guards, sometimes for no other reason than that when the reader puts the book down, she can remind herself that it defiantly never happened. It's a little harder to do that with novelizations about real wars or normal, horrible families.

Personally, my barriers go up higher when I read those books. I don't want them to ruin my day, and I often wonder why I'm not educating myself with real accounts of such things if I feel in the mood for earthly pain.

User: matociquala Date: 2006-12-27 15:29 (UTC) Subject: (no subject) Keyword: phil ochs troubador

been things like gender and racial issues, but I think it doesn't have to be so big.

There's a bunch of people out there trying to write small sharp sweet personal stories immersed in the trappings of genre. I think in some ways that's the next big SFF revolution--learning how to take that sweep of epic and balance it on a single point.

User: juliabk Date: 2006-12-28 04:55 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

learning how to take that sweep of epic and balance it on a single point.

I read this and flashed to the first story I ever sold. I didn't realize it then, but that's pretty much what I was attempting. Thank you for saying it so well.

User: floatingtide Date: 2006-12-28 06:17 (UTC) Subject: (no subject) Keyword: bunny

I think you're right that things are going toward personal and intimate, and it works for the genera. One of the things SFF is best at is the social "what if?"

I think this is harmonious with very personal stories. If an author asks the question "What if a planet had no men?" It can be fun and fine to read a story where we'd all become slim, go-go boot wearing lesbians -- plus we'd send a rocket to earth cus' we can't get by without some hawt dudes. Even so, something with Le Guin subtlety will stick with me longer. My favorite stories have all the emotional depth and grace, but keep the boots.

User: tambyrd Date: 2006-12-29 02:17 (UTC) Subject: What a wonderful way to say it

"small sharp sweet personal stories immersed in the trappings of genre ... take that sweep of epic and balance it on a single point"

For me that is the best kind of story -- both to read and to write.

I'm not an MFA so this is *only* a layperson POV -- isn't genre just the organizing form for the story, like the sentence is for the words and the paragraph for the sentences?

Perhaps some (writers/readers alike) gravitate towards a particular genre because the general trappings of that genre best resonate with the events and emotions and milestones of their stories.

As a reader I want to connect with a character, even the writer, for the few hours that I'm immersed in a story. The sharper and more personal the story, the better I can breathe it in.

User: matociquala Date: 2006-12-29 02:21 (UTC) Subject: Re: What a wonderful way to say it Keyword: softcore nerdporn _ heres_luck

;-) I failed creative writing twice. *g* I hear you, oh MFA-less one.

And I agree.

User: jaylake Date: 2006-12-29 03:11 (UTC) Subject: Re: What a wonderful way to say it

I think it's very true that some stories only work in some genres. As I mentioned before, Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" quite literally couldn't be told in another genre.

User: kaigou Date: 2006-12-27 19:57 (UTC) Subject: (no subject) Keyword: ganesha

any autobiography has been sealed in thick concrete -- no one will ever find the body

Now there's a visual that will stay with me all day. What an excellent way to put it!

User: etcet Date: 2006-12-27 13:42 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

I think that SF/F allows for a fair amount of this sort of exploration whether the author and/or audience is cognizant of it or not. I don't know if Ted's lost a child, but... yeah.

Stories dealing with death, illness, and loss seem pretty common ("Beyond the Aquila Rift," "Blood Music," and "Zima Blue," respectively), though I'm ignorant enough of the private lives of the authors to not have any sense if they're dealing with personal situations or drawing the ideas from the spiritus mundi or some other shared sphere of concepts.

At a Halloween party, you don't always need a full-body zombie prosthetic... sometimes a single stripe of makeup is enough.[1]

My stuff is either pretty transparently veiled, or fairly straight bullshit.




[1] True story: I was checking out a girl in a club once who, I realized years later, was done up like Pris from Blade Runner. Just the horizontal black stripe across her eyes was enough for me not to recognize her. Sadly, much like Pris, she was both hot -and- nuts. And inconveniently Canadian.

You have to distinguish between autobiographical influence and emotional intensity. The two are not always linked. And if they are linked, it's sometimes in very unusual and subtle ways. Not to mention, what is difficult for the writer is not necessarily emotionally difficult for the reader.

I don't think it's a failing of genre or of the writer. Some writers need more distance from reality to open up. Others need less. What matters more than this is that the "mix" is right--that you are writing not from received ideas but from details of the real world. And that some of those details are personal.

JeffV

User: matociquala Date: 2006-12-27 15:26 (UTC) Subject: Re: The Blade Keyword: can't sleep books will eat me

yes.

what you said.

User: seanmmurphy Date: 2006-12-27 19:30 (UTC) Subject: Re: The Blade

In a response to Kelly McCullough's post over on the Wyrdsmiths blog, I noted something very similar to your first point, Jeff. Namely, that the emotional intensity for the story may not have specificall to do with the author's experience, but also that what each story needs is the degree of emotional depth that best lends itself to the telling of that story. Beyond that, I would have to agree with matociquala that it becomes a grotesquerie of emotional butchery. I don't think that is what Jay is implying, mind, but the language could lend itself to that interpretation.

User: matociquala Date: 2006-12-27 15:31 (UTC) Subject: (no subject) Keyword: criminal minds reid and garcia shit

Hah! I'm reminded of that thing that Cory said at dinner that night, about one of his Clarion instructors calling him an asshole for the emotional dishonesty in his story. *g*

That, there.

Suck it up and spit it out.

User: jaylake Date: 2006-12-27 15:39 (UTC) Subject: (no subject) Keyword: jay-selfish_attention_whore

Hah! Just you wait 'til I'm off work and have time to cogently argue with myself on LJ. *Then* I'll show you...

:: mutters through a glass, darkly ::

User: matociquala Date: 2006-12-27 15:41 (UTC) Subject: (no subject) Keyword: problem cat

*snrch*

User: matociquala Date: 2006-12-27 16:24 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

Oh, man.

If that's what you're looking for, may I humply suggest you read Peter Watts' new book? And last year's Hugo winner, Spin. And M. John Harrison's Light.

And going back in time a little, John Brunner--Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, Children of the Thunder.

And I gotta tell you, I'm not having a hard time selling books with unHollywood endings, either.

One of the reasons I love SFF as a genre is that it's possible, here, to write books with ambiguous and even hardcore downer endings and get away with it.

User: matociquala Date: 2006-12-27 17:04 (UTC) Subject: (no subject) Keyword: steed and peel needed

I'm not missing your point at all. I'm explaining that the books you're saying you haven't found do exist.

None of those are HEA. None of what I write has HEA. Those books I named are books that explore the human condition and come back with answers other than "because human is the only way to be."

Also, Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human; Phillip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Nancy Kress Beggars in Spain, Ursula LeGuin The Left Hand of Darkness, and a bunch more I could name....

User: cpolk Date: 2006-12-27 16:28 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

Further, sci fi -- hard-core genre sci fi, that is (as distinct from mass market books with science fiction themes) -- focusses so much on hooks and clever gimmicks that it rarely hits the nitty-gritty of what it means to be human -- or not human.

I don't know whether to laugh or go blind.

I'm not the best read person in the whole world - actually when it comes to SF I might as well be illiterate. but the main reason that I like it is even when I'm reading an adventure story series or book of teh year 2004, 2005, or 2006, these writers are all staring at what it means to be human.

some of them do it without blinking, which awes and astounds me.

I could of course just put this down to my amazing and impeccable taste in literature, but it could just as easily be that I'm reading what I want to.

User: cpolk Date: 2006-12-27 16:32 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

laughingly, if I had taken the time to name names, I would have suggested Light, Spin, and Blindsight because those were EXACTLY the books I was thinking of when I said book of teh year 2004, 2005, and 2006.

they're stellar examples of the presence of that which you said lacks in SF, so they're easy pickings.

User: cpolk Date: 2006-12-27 17:03 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

woot! i'm all shiny, yo!

User: cpolk Date: 2006-12-27 17:58 (UTC) Subject: but hang on...

I'm reading this comment of yours, and I can't shake the notion that it's supposed to be finished with "so your opinion of what SF is isn't accurate."

i mean, you said that the problem/resolution format was part of the incredibly rigid norms and rules of Sci-Fi (I say SF myself, but that's all right) and I just don't think there's a really rigid rule about SF other than, "if you yank the spec element out, then the whole thing crashes into a nonsensical heap." and even then I will forgive if I'm really digging what's going on.

so maybe it's my perception of that which gives me the perspective. I'm not even sure I know these rules of which you mention. Sure, there are SF stories that are in the problem/resolution format. but it's not like SF is the only genre (and I include literary fiction as a genre) that does this. people very often tell stories to show a resolution, and you don't need space battles, noble knights, handsome heroes, or determined detectives to force that. Midnight's Children *resolves,* and Salman Rushdie is definitely a literary writer. Oryx and Crake does not *resolve,* and Margaret Atwood was writing Science Fiction as a literary writer(no matter what she tried to say about it, but again, that's another matter.)

Do I need to mention Kurt Vonnegut? okay, good.

So if I point at the best damn SF book I read in whatever year, why does that invalidate my opinion? do these books suddenly not exist because they're good?

like the books I've mentioned - I don't want to denigrate the beauty of the spec in these books as hooks and clever gimmicks. This is brainsweat that we are talking about, here. to disparage the shield in Spin (which is the reason the book has a plot to drive a damned chilling theme) as a gimmick would be a tragedy. Then there's the sheer depth Blindsight's world projects from advances and speculations so plentiful you have to wonder if Dr. Watts has external storage for his brain (lesser writers could just trail along behind him and scrabble for the pennies of spec he accidentally drops while buying gum.) but you need every damned one of them - vampires, Heaven, baselines, synthesis, and about eleventy zillion more - to show what the world has become, to talk about the theme that he talks about on four obvious levels throughout the book. I would say that if a reader cannot honor that as a marvel, they're probably better off browsing in a different section of the bookstore entirely.

And the spec does not remove from the bleeding, in these books. they're awe-full. I don't think anyone mentioned them to you in response to your saying that you rarely see or feel blood-letting when reading SF to argue with you, but simply to share what you say you're not experiencing.

User: r0ck3tsci3ntist Date: 2006-12-27 17:10 (UTC) Subject: (no subject) Keyword: normal

The examples that you've mentioned do support your argument, but I find them very limited. Popular yes - interesting? Well, in my opinion, no.

I wholeheartedly agree with matociquala about Light (M. John Harrison). Also consider almost any Iain Banks book as an example of using the trappings of SciFi and worldbuilding like the petals of the proverbial rose, unfolding to reveal a glimpse into the soul. (Sorry - he always brings out the failed poet in me :p )

As a reader ( and purchaser) of Scifi/F, I tend to demand a little blood - after all, I paid for it, didn't I?

User: r0ck3tsci3ntist Date: 2006-12-27 17:19 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

uhm, the original post I was responding to has vanished. The examples I was refering to were those mentioning Rodennberry (don't even remember how to spell the name) and such like, not Light, Spin and Blindsight.

I too tend to think that you show astonishing good taste cpolk. :D

User: akirlu Date: 2006-12-27 23:33 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

Counterexamples: KINDRED by Octavia Butler, or HANDMAID'S TALE by Margaret Atwood (when she claimed she wasn't writing genre, she was wrong). I had at least one other in my head, but it fell back out again.

User: scarlettina Date: 2006-12-28 00:00 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

See also MOCKINGBIRD by Walter Tevis.

User: akirlu Date: 2006-12-28 00:57 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

Yanno, I know we have several books by Walter Tevis, and I simply haven't read any of them yet. Must do something about that.

User: slithytove Date: 2006-12-28 10:11 (UTC) Subject: Pomes Keyword: writing

I'm absurdly late to this discussion, but I couldn't let it go without linking to Robert Browning's 'House'.

Nine and sixty ways, and all that. Browning obviously felt that it was wildly inappropriate to reveal oneself through one's fiction.

Obviously one's fiction will draw upon one's own experiences, feelings, and thoughts about the world. We differ in how much 'veiling' we need. I need a good bit, myself. Still, large parts of me are there, deep down, in the Burgess Shale of my fiction.

There's probably a bimodal distribution of, um, veil thickness, with men tending towards one side of the curve, and women towards the other. With exceptions.

And on that note, Kingsley Amis's famous/infamous "Bookshop Idyll". I can't find the text conveniently online, so here 'tis. Please forgive the sexism, it's an older poem.

Between the gardening and the cookery
Comes the brief Poetry shelf;
By the Nonesuch Donne, a thin anthology
Offers itself.

Critical, and with nothing else to do,
I scan the Contents page,
Relieved to find the names are mostly new;
No one my age.

Like all strangers, they divide by sex:
Landscape near Parma
Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex,
So does Rilke and Buddha.

'I travel, you see,' 'I think' and 'I can read'
These titles seem to say;
But I Remember You, Love is my Creed,
Poem for J.,

The ladies' choice, discountenance my patter
For several seconds;
From somewhere in this (as in any) matter
A moral beckons.

Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart
Or squash it flat?
Man's love is of man's life a thing apart;
Girls aren't like that.

We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff
Can get by without it.
Women don't seem to think that's good enough;
They write about it,

And the awful way their poems lay them open
Just doesn't strike them.
Women are really much nicer than men:
No wonder we like them.

Deciding this, we can forget those times
We sat up half the night
Chock-full of love, crammed with bright thoughts, names, rhymes,
And couldn't write.

User: jaylake Date: 2006-12-28 14:36 (UTC) Subject: Re: Pomes

And poetry itself is a whole nother discussion anyway, because the veiling is so different.

User: sallytuppence Date: 2006-12-28 16:52 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

I'm late, too. But I'm interested in the metaphors used in this discussion.

Blood, jagged blades, probing into one's heart. Bloodletting. Genre as a 'shield' (thus is writing emotional truth a battle?).

What if the emotional truth sought is joy? Transformation, consolation, the unexpected turn into completion and happiness?

User: haddayr Date: 2006-12-28 21:50 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

You accepted a genre story of mine in _Polyphony_ that was basically memoir, of the most raw kind (about my father's death).

User: jaylake Date: 2006-12-28 21:51 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

And I remember it vividly, even now.