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owlectomyNormally I would not get picky about someone choosing to excoriate Dan Brown for being a bad writer, but this is pretty terrible.
If you are writing a dirty-realist story full of flat detail about two married people who don't like each other very much, then a certain percentage of the thinking and imagining has been taken out of the exercise, no? Read through the Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories and tell me that they don't all start to blend together after a while. Can I say that without being all "All literary fiction is depressing and boring and exactly the same!"? I like lots of literary fiction. I think that as writers we are all leaves on a huge tree, with some leaves brushing up against us and some all the way on the other side of the tree and to champion being original and uninfluenced rather misses the point.
FOR EVERYONE, lots of decisions are already made at the point where you start writing, or start thinking about the kind of thing that you might like to write. Your own life experiences and your own reading experiences feed into that, and feed into each other. One person reads classic science fiction and finds something that speaks to them, and that's what drives them to write. Another reads classic science fiction and finds something that speaks to them sometimes, almost, and it's the friction there that drives them to write. And for both of those people, science fiction provides a set of tools and tropes and a way of talking about things. It's not, "Oh, I'm writing science fiction, so I don't have to think about this and that"; it's, "I'm thinking about this and that, and science fiction gives me a way for thinking about those things."
It's worth dealing with the difference again, since everyone seems to have forgotten it or become chary of the articulation. Mainly this: that even good genre (not Larsson or Brown) is by definition a constrained form of writing. There are conventions and these limit the material. That's the way writing works and lots of people who don't write novels don't seem to get this: if you need a detective, if you need your hero to shoot the badass CIA chief, if you need faux-feminist shopping jokes, then great; but the correlative of these decisions is a curtailment in other areas. If you are following conventions, then a significant percentage of the thinking and imagining has been taken out of the exercise. Lots of decisions are already made.
If you are writing a dirty-realist story full of flat detail about two married people who don't like each other very much, then a certain percentage of the thinking and imagining has been taken out of the exercise, no? Read through the Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories and tell me that they don't all start to blend together after a while. Can I say that without being all "All literary fiction is depressing and boring and exactly the same!"? I like lots of literary fiction. I think that as writers we are all leaves on a huge tree, with some leaves brushing up against us and some all the way on the other side of the tree and to champion being original and uninfluenced rather misses the point.
FOR EVERYONE, lots of decisions are already made at the point where you start writing, or start thinking about the kind of thing that you might like to write. Your own life experiences and your own reading experiences feed into that, and feed into each other. One person reads classic science fiction and finds something that speaks to them, and that's what drives them to write. Another reads classic science fiction and finds something that speaks to them sometimes, almost, and it's the friction there that drives them to write. And for both of those people, science fiction provides a set of tools and tropes and a way of talking about things. It's not, "Oh, I'm writing science fiction, so I don't have to think about this and that"; it's, "I'm thinking about this and that, and science fiction gives me a way for thinking about those things."
(no subject)
13/12/10 09:43 (UTC)There's a lot of stuff you get in genre that seems to have vanished from litfic - e.g. crime novels which deal with murder in the context of people's working lives and often have a lot of detail about same. George Eliot didn't have problems with showing Garth being a land agent and teaching Fred Vincy the ropes of same, or Lydgate being a doctor, but somehow the working life (except Being A Writer or equivalent artist) is not something that features much in litfic.