genre avoidance

[egypturnash]

[The editor of Atlantic Monthly in the late 1800s] claimed that authors had gone astray by being imitators of one another rather than of nature. He proscribed writing about "interesting" characters--such as famous historical figures or creatures of myth. He decried exotic settings—places such as Rome or Pompeii, and he denounced tales that told of uncommon events. He praised stories that dealt with the everyday, where "nobody murders or debauches anybody else; there is no arson or pillage of any sort; there is no ghost, or a ravening beast, or a hair-breadth escape, or a shipwreck, or a monster of self-sacrifice, or a lady five thousand years old in the course of the whole story." He denounced tales with sexual innuendo. He said that instead he wanted to publish stories about the plight of the "common man," just living an ordinary existence. Because Howells was the editor of the largest and most powerful magazine of the time (and because of its fabulous payment rates, a short story sale to that magazine could support a writer for a year or two), his views had a tremendous influence on American writers.

Well. Now I know why 'mainstream' fiction is so hostile to the fantastic.

Comments

[paka.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to remember what it was called - there was this official manifesto thing from some science fiction authors about how they were going to avoid cliches, like aliens or FTL drives or robots or whatever. It sounded a lot like the Howell thing.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

'Mundane' science fiction, I think?

[tracerj.livejournal.com]

Basically, it sounds like anyone seeking to limit the range of writing is committing a number of errors, from pop-psyching the reasons for the popularity of those things to bitching about the popularity of things they don't like.

Anyhow, what're you left with when you excise aliens and FTL drives and robots from sci-fi? Well, cyberpunk, I suppose, and if that hasn't become a gloriously tangled mess of clichés then I don't know what has. Somehow, people keep coming up with new ideas within all of these....

[coyoteseven.livejournal.com]

Uh-oh. If everything that humans create eventually becomes tired and cliche, so that we turn around and embrace something "new" only for it too to become tired and cliche, does that mean that we as a race, a species, are really just tired of ourselves?

[tracerj.livejournal.com]

Yes, but that's all right, because we contain within ourselves the potential to become more than we are now and expend our gamut, and thus give ourselves more room to create stuff that we're not tired of yet. We're not done with this existence, not by a long-shot. *grin*

[bikerwalla.livejournal.com]

We take pieces of everyone else's discarded thoughts and combine them into new ones. Other people complain when the pieces are large enough to be recognizable.

[eggshellhammer.livejournal.com]

Ideally, you find new cliches. That's the whole goal of the exercise of avoiding cliche, ideally, that being to find new cliches to play with.

[paka.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it seemed lame.

First off, because both Howell and the Mundane Science Fiction thing sound too much like people just slamming shit because it makes them feel big. You know the sort of person - oooh, the perfect way to prove they're all cool and rational and intellectual is to slam furries, or otherkin, or religious types, or childish wish-fulfillment in science fiction, or whatever.

Also, I'm pretty interested in social science fiction. I'm interested in how people work, and how people react to each other. So having FTL drives or aliens or whatever poses a what if question; what are people like, when their lives include all this stuff? Going the opposite direction, with fantasy, what are the people like when their lives are influenced by having dragons, magic, or soul-corrupting rings of power around? And you have these neat fantastic elements which are pretty cool in themselves and add to the story.

You get rid of all that stuff, and you've got the question of "what are people like if their lives include all the stuff you've got right here, right now?" Uh... I already get to observe that 24/7, what's the draw in reading fiction about that? At that rate I may as well read an actual psychology book and learn something.

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

I agree with this comment.

And y'know, looking at it like that, an insistence on only writing stories about the common man set in the here and now could be thought of as a form of laziness. Don't like far-future settings or fantasy settings because the dialog and props come off as cheesy? Simple, just get rid of them! Don't bother trying to figure out how to write good uncheesy far-future or fantasy settings; just proclaim them worthless as literary territory!

[tracerj.livejournal.com]

Precisely my point, especially about the social science fiction. Hell, look at where I spend my time. In City of Heroes, I'm not just running around beating the shit out of things and then posing with other hero types in some sort of testosterone-soaked polygonal orgy-of-ego. In a setting that has such powerful individuals, the questions of power and rights and authority are a constant presence, and I play with those all over the place. Anybody who writes it off as adolescent four-colour wankery, I explain it to once. If they keep brushing it off, then they become a future wall statistic for when the revolution comes. Writing about the future is how we prepare for it.