Okay, I had to start with this. I've been away from my blog for so long, you probably wondered if I ever was coming back. Well, I'm back. And I've watched Sherlock season 3 and Doctor Who Christmas Special and many other nerdy things. Have you seen The Lego Movie? You should. And I might blog about that later.
I have a lot of ideas for future blog posts. They've been accumulating behind the dam of my procrastination and frazzled panic. Yes, part of this hiatus was purely laziness. I just couldn't get myself moving to blog again. At first it was a lack of subject matter and then it was too much. I didn't know what to talk about.
The other part was a workload known only to graduate students in their last semester, staring down the barrel of the Thesis Defense. I had a novel to complete, drafts to polish, paperwork to fill out, people to track down for signatures, readings to study, and a corner to crawl into and rock, fetal-position, as I realized I could count the hours until my defense on my fingers and toes.
(Kidding - I actually spent that time knitting and denying that anything was about to happen. I'm making a shawl with green yarn. It has leaf patterns. Next up is either Hermione's beaded bag or a 221B Backer Street wallpaper pillow. Yes, I'm a geek. Look above for further proof.)
Long story short, I passed the defense. Yay! I'm a master of fine arts, if not officially, then technically. I can finally stop feeling like an impostor in this program. So what I do to celebrate? I went to a writing conference in Seattle, where I ate oysters and didn't sleep much. Oh yeah, and learned about writing.
A few weeks ago I went to the Life, The Universe, and Everything conference in Provo, where I learned about writing science fiction, fantasy, and horror and how to make a living writing. And then I went to AWP in Seattle, where people stepped around the subject of genre or defended it and talked about how to make a living with a day job while writing your art. I don't know what to believe anymore.
I liked both. I learned a lot from both and made a lot of contacts that will be valuable to me as I continue my writing career. I actually ran into the same publisher at both places, which felt a little fate-y to me. We'll see what happens with that. I don't have the time or the mental capacity to share everything that happened at these conferences, so I'll say this: if you haven't gone to writer's conferences, go. I've learned a lot over the years by attending these conferences, and even when I don't learn anything new, the sessions tend to spark new ideas in me and polish the ideas I already have. Thinking about writing is never a bad thing, and if you can do that while learning more about your craft from smart, accomplished writers (I saw Brandon Sanderson and Orson Scott Card at LTUE, and Ursula K. LeGuin and Sherman Alexie at AWP), it's worth the registration fee. There are other ways to get in without paying a lot, but that's a subject for another day.
Now, I'm back and done with the thesis. I'm conferenced-out and want nothing more than to rest and read the books I want to read. I have lots of story ideas, and now I have the time to work on them. And the names of weird literary journals (I mean weird in the best possible way) to send them to. Of course, I also have time to write on this blog again.
I bet, after my manifesto last week, you didn't expect me to review a book that I, at least, would call YA literary fiction. Well, I that's what I'm doing. I read literary fiction. I read anything: historical, romance, fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, adventure, biographies, cookbooks...I've actually followed people because I hadn't finished reading their shirts.
I like stories about the highs and lows of human life, wherever that is. I don't like this weird postmodern push in literary fiction to write a story without a "threshold," a moment where the protagonist either chooses something or is in a situation he/she can't come back from, or an epiphany, where this moment in a protagonist's life matters for some reason. Some stories now are trying to be boring - their word, actually, not mine. They're trying to present, in beautiful language, a slice of a character's life where nothing happens. The person does and thinks what he/she always does or thinks. No change. No reason for this part of the character's life to be immortalized in fiction. I want to read things and feel like there's a point to it, not that I just spent the last hour of my life reading a piece that gave me nothing, as a reader, and felt more like the writer showing off how well he/she can write. The worst, for me, is when it's clear the writer doesn't care what the reader wants in a story. Two people create a work of fiction: the writer and the reader. I think writers have a responsibility to honor the reader with their work.
John Green, I think, does this. His writing is beautiful. Really, A+ on lovely language. The voice of his main character in The Fault in Our Stars, Hazel, is very interesting to read and sounds like a defined, real person. If nothing else, read this book to learn how to use language like a pro. Descriptions are elegantly written without exhausting words and Green manages to handle talking about kids with cancer beautifully.
That was another thing I liked about this book. It doesn't feel too cliche. I think one of the reasons I list to sci-fi/fantasy writing is because a writer can easily write about death and dying and other really weighty issues without sounding sappy or angry. The story can be about the characters more than the issue without feeling like it needs to pay homage to some overruling message. (I like messages, and I think they should be there, but I think they should be second to the story and characters.) Green, in this novel, writes a story about teens dying of cancer without making them sound like saints, like some do, and he also doesn't swing too far to the other side, describing death in the most graphic terms possible to deliberately avoid the sappy, saintly cancer story. Green does a good job showing the situation from the perspective of people who are trying to come to terms with dying young and potentially unremembered.
The book is charming because the characters feel real and their reactions to death feel real, not overly emotional or fictionalized. However, I don't think this book is perfect. The characters Hazel and Augustus don't feel like teenagers. They feel too intelligent, to philosophical, too mature to be teenagers. I'm not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I kept seeing them as young adults in my mind and didn't exactly feel the urgency of teens sick with cancer, and I didn't sense the importance of the kind of things that would be important to teens. On the other hand, I enjoyed reading the characters and thought they were interesting. I can buy two very smart teens, though it may be pushing it that these two very smart teens found each other so easily. And the romance was so smooth. It felt forced, just a little.
The thing I didn't like about the book (really, the only thing) was that I felt like a message was getting pushed on me. I've already said I don't like it when a story is all about the message, and I don't think Green is writing a philosophy on dying and remembering the dead disguised as a YA novel. However, I could take a pen and circle on the page places where I can see Green's ideas coming out. It felt in some ways like Green was using his characters, his very smart teenaged characters, to say what he wanted to say, not necessarily what they would say in the situation. It's usually gracefully done, but the story isn't as "first place" as I would have liked it to be. I think the message would come out even if these characters weren't sitting around, playing video games and talking about very deep things all the time.
I know. The characters are concerned with death and dying. They are more likely to think about matters like this than the average teen. But still. Something feels a little false in this, a little too authorial. Just a little. Green is a master composer, crafting language into music that can carry you away to the place he wants to take you. There's a lot to be said, good things, about this book. I just don't like feeling preached to by my literature.
And now I'm going to get roasted for saying something negative about this book. I know a lot of people love it, and there's a lot to love. Read it. It's good. But I don't give books Brownie Points because they are sad. Some books are terrible but end in a death that is so dripping with emotion the readers sob and think that means the novel was well-written. I don't. In fact, I've never cried reading a book. Could be a cold heart, or maybe an analytic mind. Green's book is well-written, but it didn't give me what I was looking for, not everything. So I wrote for you my honest opinion. Take it as you will. But read the book. It's good writing.
Maybe read it over Thanksgiving. Or read whatever you like. Just have a happy holiday, and eat way more than you should. It's the American way.
Recently, I've been reading The Lord of Opium by Nancy Farmer. Awesome book, by the way. Nancy Farmer is a spectacular writer. It's the sequel to her novel The House of the Scorpion, a science fiction set in a future time when clones are created to provide spare parts for aging drug lords. The protagonist, a clone named Matt, encounters a lot of hatred because in this world, "filthy clones" are unnatural and therefore considered worse than cockroaches. Even though he is intelligent and capable, he is considered lesser, much lesser, than human.
I'm not going to review the book now, though it is awesome and you should read it. I'm saying this because I feel like genre fiction, especially science fiction and fantasy, is the "filthy clone" of the literary world. It doesn't seem to matter how well-crafted, how poetic, how inspiring and full of meaning a genre text is; the common belief seems to be that the best genre fiction is worse than the average literary fiction.
This debate is not new. It has been scratching at the soft part of my neck for a long time. It just sliced deeper, though, this week, when this NYT article came out, talking about why Mormons can't seem to write good literature. And then this response, which makes some good points but still annoyed me. Why? Because both articles automatically assume that anything genre is not good literature. (I would like to point out that if you look up a list of the 100 greatest novels of all time, a significant number are genre. Depending on your list, Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game is there. Card is a Mormon, and a genre fiction writer.)
Some definitions: genre is any kind of fiction that has clear conventions. We're talking science fiction, fantasy, romance, action/adventure, mystery, horror, thriller, historical fiction...wow, there's not much left over for the literary genre. Literary is a genre. It has conventions too. These tend to be dense and poetic writing, a focus on character over plot, lots of character interiority, subtext and ambiguity. Personally, the literary fiction I've read also seem to include a lot of pessimism about the human condition, and nothing ever seems to get done.
As a Mormon and a genre fiction writer, I would like to make my defense. I can't speak for all Mormons, but I can speak for myself. First, I think deciding one genre is better than another is arrogance of the worst kind. It's like saying swimming is inherently better than running or cake is just always better than pie. Different skills, different requirements. Genre writing, especially speculative genres like sci-fi and fantasy, require worldbuilding far beyond the level required in literary. Literary has its own necessary skills. Do not discount genres just because they aren't what you like.
That's what it comes down to. What we like. I have been called a sell-out for writing fantasy. I've been told I'm wasting (even prostituting) my talents. No. Just no. I write fantasy because I read fantasy. It's what I like. I read literary as well, but it doesn't rock my world. I have found more meaning in fantasy than in literary and that's fine. It's my style. Others may feel differently and that's also fine. But it would be selling out if I gave up what excites me and makes me want to become a better writer for the approval of a few intellectuals. I'm not doing this for money or fame. I'm doing this for me.
That said, I think all writers have the dream of their art lasting through the ages. I think we want fame and money and eternity. Or at the very least, I think we want to get read. And the truth is, genre fiction lasts. Mythology? Genre. Fairy tales? Genre. The Odyssey and Robin Hood and King Arthur and most of Shakespeare? All genre, and they've lasted for a long time. The human condition seems to crave enchantment and adventure, and while postmodern literary is in vogue right now (it hasn't always been), genre seems to be eternal.
As a Mormon, I believe there are stories that matter more than others. I think there is truth we don't remember but can recognize when it is shown to us. The Hero's Cycle, so popular in fantasy, is one. It resembles closely, to me, the LDS Plan of Salvation. I believe we existed before we were born, and what's more, we chose to come, even knowing that life would be hard, which it is. In terms of fantasy, we were offered a quest, and we took it. To me, that means we are all, every last human, so much more than we think we are. We are brave, we are heroes. We just forgot it. In the words of G.K. Chesterton, "We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense
and rationality and practicality and positivism
only
means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that
we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstacy
only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget." That moment may be awful, but it is also glorious.
I refuse to write mundane matters for people who are not mundane. I won't write about people who are passive and acted upon for people who are capable of acting and changing their circumstances. I refuse to write pessimism and nihilism and stories where characters strive but nothing they do matter, and they have an epiphany that they are not important. Invoking the popular genre character the Doctor, I'd say, "I have never met anyone who wasn't important." Life is too hard to spread anything but hope.
Does my desire to write hope mean that I am sticking my fingers in my ears and singing to myself when evil and pain tries to get my attention? No. I recognize the darkness. I use it. My characters go through so much pain before they succeed in the end. I've put my characters through heartbreak, loss, rage, guilt, sorrow, physical pain, self-doubt, conflict with loved ones, etc. I make them stare into the darkness around them and inside them. Everything they might do in a literary work. I can take it to extremes because fantasy buffers the suffering, it seems. It's not real. Neither is any other kind of fiction, but still.
The difference is I don't spend much time in my characters' heads regarding their struggles. I try to show the struggle externally. A character makes a mistake that costs the life of a person he cares about. So instead of thinking about for twenty pages, he mourns for a little and then picks up a sword and goes to war. Filled with guilt, he does what he can to fix the problem he created and try, as best he can, to make up for what he'd done. His actions tell more about him than his thoughts would. My characters are ragged and weary when they finish their adventure. They don't always get what they want, but they succeed. Because that's life.
As for the belief that anyone with a happy childhood and life can't write great fiction, I say no one has had a happy childhood. Some are worse than others, yes, some much worse. But take a moment and consider what it was like to grow up. The first time you encountered death, the first time you saw your parents cry or fight or get really angry. A moment you got left somewhere or lost and thought you were abandoned. Everything is new and therefore dire to a child. Even if the home is happy, growing up is hard. Elementary school is hard, trying to learn things you're no good at. Middle school, with its cliques and bullying, is hard. High school, finding one's identity, is hard. Flannery O'Connor said, "Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days." It's true. The situations may be different, but the feelings are there, and they are real. Writers can draw on the pain of being left for ten minutes at the mall just as well as they can draw on being abandoned by a parent. Pain is real for everyone regardless of circumstance. Life is hard, but we can do it. We were not set up to fail.
Yes, maybe I'm overly optimistic like my Mormon brothers and sisters in deciding to use my writing to spread hope. But if books are meant to be read, then they carry messages. And what better message than hope? Without it, what are we good for? A couple years ago, I lost my hope. The future I thought was right for me was slipping away, leaving a landscape of darkness in front of me. The possibility of having to work at Wal-Mart in a job I hated and having to live in my parents' house became real and terrifying to me. I doubted everything, my talents, my plans, my worthiness. I felt like the heavens were toying with me, and I grabbed onto my faith like driftwood in a flood.
But there is a God, and he did care. That semester I was taking a class on the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien and reading The Lord of the Rings. Genre fiction. But that fantasy touched me more than a realistic literary piece could. It spoke of hope. I read about Frodo and Sam walking into Mordor, literally the Dark Land, with no combat experience or hope of returning. Yet they kept going. This speech from The Two Towers film spoke directly to me:
If the story had been about a real or realistic person encountering nasty ordeals, I would have felt guilty about how much despair I felt about my own circumstances. They were not dire to anyone but me; no one would use them in fiction of any kind. But because LOTR is fantasy and I would never, could never, have to carry the One Ring to Mordor and destroy it, I felt no pressure to compare my situation to it. I just adopted the story as my own. If they could do what they did, I could also step into the darkness, hold on, and keep going in my smaller problems. So I did, and my hope came back.
Why do I write fantasy? Because it arms people. "Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist.
Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the
dragons can be killed," says G.K. Chesterton.
Stories have power, and I think craft and good writing is important in helping those stories shine out. It doesn't matter what they are. I can write in the literary style, and I intend to. But my stories will have magic. And even though I will drag my characters through dirt laced with sharp rocks, even though I will smash everything they care about and make them pick up the pieces, they will triumph. Because through their pain, they will become what I want them to be.
Craft and good writing is important in any genre, and I think it is arrogance to say that one genre doesn't have it because of what it is. As a writer, I prefer writing fantasy. I intend to use all my skills in writing it, even the ones necessary for fantasy specifically. Worldbuilding, for one. Because I can do anything, I have to set rules and stick to them. If my character is about to die and I'd have to change the rules of the world to save him/her, I can't. I have to revise a lot or let the character go. It takes a lot of self-discipline and understanding what makes a good story to write good fantasy. I might not want the character to die, but it might be what the story needs.
People are going to continue to read fantasy and I feel no guilt in supplying it. It's what I want to write. I am not going to stop doing what I love just because people look down their noses at me, though I'd wish they'd stop. They'll go cross-eyed. But people deserve to have good fantasy. Well-written, with lovely language and strong craft. Characters who feel real and readers can relate to. Plots that make sense and follow their own logic. I'm getting an MFA to learn how to do this well in anything I write.
If I can, I'd like to write layers. Subtext. The best fantasies I've read are excellent stories for those looking for a good story, but they, like onions and ogres, have layers. Think Holes. Think The Lord of the Rings. Think A Wrinkle in Time. They are all good stories, but if you think that's all they are, I'd have to respectfully say you're wrong. A good fantasy allows deeper diving. Symbols. Meaning. Subtext. It doesn't have to be clear enough to articulate, but it can be clear enough to feel. That's why I think the best fantasy lasts, because it, like Shakespeare's plays, speak to many different people about many different things. It's clear enough to understand. I don't think that's a bad thing.
Sometimes confusing and obscure is just confusing and obscure. What good is something if no one can read it? It's showing off, and is good for the writer but no one else. Popular could mean bad, but I think we do ourselves a disservice if we don't try to figure out what about fantasy (and other genres) so appeals to people. It might tell us something about what it means to be human, and isn't that the goal of every kind of fiction?
This has been a long post. I'm just so sick of being told that, essentially, no matter how much I hone my craft, I will never be as good as the literary fiction writers. No. Stop it. Write your stories and let me write mine. Appreciate beauty in all its forms. And stop trying to name who of today's writers will and won't be considered great. Give it 300 years, and then let's talk.
Today is October 31st, and you know what that means. People watching! Okay, so candy and pumpkins and costumes too, but it is yet early in the day and the best I can do is sit here in my costume no one gets (is Clara Oswin Oswald that obscure?) and watch out the window at the other students passing by in their costumes. It's more fun than it probably should be. I like Halloween because it's interesting to see who comes as what and how awesome their costumes look. So, here's a list of what I've seen so far today:
- The Doctor (11), both male and female
- The Doctor (4), male
- Aang
- A Kyoshi Warrior
- Dr. Horrible
- The Magic School Bus (functional, will take you where you want to go)
- The Men in Black
- Batman
- Superman
- Spider-Man
- Steampunk figures of all kinds
- The Knights of the Round Table, without horses but with a servant and coconuts
- Snow White
- Little Bo Peep
- Flynn Rider
- Rapunzel
- Jack Frost
- Various Harry Potter characters
- An Asian farmer
- Two Russians
- Charlie from "Lost"
- Finn the Human
- The fandoms (3 girls dressed as "Doctor Who," "Sherlock," and "Supernatural." They wore colors, clothes and motifs from the shows. I ran after them, but lost them.)
- Waldo
- Velma
- Carmen Sandiego
- The Dread Pirate Roberts
- Inigo Montoya
- Hard-core leather-clad bikers
- Peter Pan
- Buddy the Elf
- Gandalf
- A banana
- A gorilla
- A Stormtrooper
- A Jedi
- A character from "TRON"
- Rosie the Riveter
- A zombie
- A French girl
- Link
That's all I can think of now, and I'm sure I will continue to see awesome costumes as the day progresses. Last year I saw an excellent Zuko costume at a late-night Halloween party. Anyway, looking over this list, I'm starting to think that Halloween is becoming a holiday where you can let your geek flag fly. So many fandom characters. So many.
The thesis is moving well, and I've started dreaming about my characters. The climax in in full swing and I'm not sure I'm handling it well (that's what revision is for, right?) but the characters keep surprising me and they feel real. Hence the dreaming; I don't usually dream of my characters until they become real enough that I can't control them anymore. IT'S ALIVE!
Anyway, I workshopped the first story of my thesis last week and I've been looking over comments. One of the compliments I got - and yes, there was plenty of criticism; I'm working on it - was that I'm good at setting. A classmate commented that in this piece and another story I wrote the setting felt real. Nebraska feels like Nebraska and Alaska feels like Alaska. I've gotten this comment before about other works. I've been told that my stories make people feel like they're there. They see and smell and feel what that location looks and smells and feels like.
This was weird to me. I don't practice setting like I practice pacing (my weakest skill) and character (the most important skill, to me). But I don't think it's inherent. I've traveled a lot, but that doesn't necessarily translate to the written word. I thought about it, and I think I know why this is working.
I'm a fantasy writer. I need to be able to build a world and then inhabit it. I need to be able to describe everything in a fictional world, from the smells of the food to the feel of the rocks and wood, to how the people speak. I need to be able to sit in my world and watch. This is translating to stories I write in the real world; I sit and watch the people in my memories of these places, in the facts I read about them, in the pictures I look up. I worldbuild the real world.
Huh.
I bet I'm not alone. I bet other fantasy writers are also finding setting easy or more colorful than expected. I hope so; that means that there is a technical benefit to writing speculative fiction. Worldbuilding translates well to any kind of writing. You can bet I'm going to teach my creative writing students worldbuilding.
It's been a busy week, but I'm still going to try to post weekly. This may be a short post today. First off, I finished reading the novel Yesterday Again by Barry Lyga, the third book in the Archvillain series, and it was awesome. It was a good example of the ending being both unexpected but inevitable - I didn't see it coming, but once it came, it made sense. It changed the entire dynamic of the book, made it more serious and changed the direction. I like it, and I hope the series continues because I SO want to keep reading.
The reason the week's been so busy is due, primarily, to the fact that my master's thesis proposal is filed and now I need to focus my energy on writing the thesis. I got a start in September, but stopped for a while to focus on the prospectus. Now that's done and I need to get back to the thesis.
Not much to say on this, other than I'm working hard to write at least 1,000 words a day (about an hour's work, on an average day. I type fast), which means that on days I revise I need to make sure I'm still adding 1,000 words total, even after deleting some work. It can get long. But I'm happy with the direction of the plot right now, the pacing (sort of), and what my characters are doing.
The trouble is, my protagonist is evolving and I'm not sure what to do with it. When I started writing her, the biggest obstacle I thought she'd need to overcome would be external. I thought she'd need to manage her relationships with people and eventually escape from danger. Physical danger. Now, she's showing me that her greatest vulnerabilities are internal. She's haunted by her past to the point that it is speaking to her, preventing her from healing and moving on. It's good, I like it when my characters take over and show themselves for who they are, but it's going to cause some knotty problems later when I try to revise.
I'll keep you posted on writing developments and publishing. Nothing conclusive to say there, but I can tell you that I think it's going well.
I didn't really go on vacation. I just haven't posted in a while. I'm neck-deep in the semester and am trying to teach 1 1/3 classes (it makes sense, I promise) and stay on top of my own while finishing my thesis prospectus AND get a move on with my thesis. I hit writer's block with it, and it doesn't help when my fiction workshop takes a short story I wrote and asks that it become a novel.
Okay, that was flattering, I'll admit. But now I'm thinking about this story when I should be thinking about my thesis. And I am, thinking about my thesis, I mean. I'm just not anxious to work on it because I think I've got some serious revision ahead of me. Ah, who am I kidding, it's not going to be that bad. I'm just lazy and impulsive. The new idea involves superheroes, though.
Without giving too much away (my story, my idea, MINE, PRECIOUS!), my story features superheroes. I look at the superhero genre in a new way, one that apparently doesn't come to mind. The short story undermines some expected tropes of superhero-ness, and my class liked that. They also want a novel, which made me think in terms of novel, and now, guess what, the story has metamorphosed into a novel. I'm worried about keeping up the fresh view of superheroes.
I figure that in order to keep undermining and twisting superhero cliches I need to know them. So, today, I am using my blog as prewriting and am going to list superhero cliches so I know them and can undermine them...NOW:
- Colorful costumes and masks
- Love interest is not a superhero and often not all that bright
- Many villains per one hero
- Heroes use brawn, villains use brains, brains lose
- Superheroes are young, fit, and beautiful
- Superheroes are created through accidents, an act of fate
- Superheroes are noble and selfless
- Technology is very advanced and not well understood
- Things fall from space. A lot. With ghastly consequences.
- Scientists are prone to test experiments on themselves
- Lab accidents happen all the time
- People are always falling from buildings
- Heroes live in a big city
- Superheroes always seem to mutate/get powers that are helpful and don't cause medical trouble
- Superheroes work for newspapers, are scientists, or are independently wealthy
- Hero backstory often contains some traumatic event that caused hero to fight for justice (or revenge, or whatever)
- Secret identity remains hidden to the world at all times (not even families know)
That's all I can come up with now. If you have any other superhero cliches I'm not thinking of, I'd be very grateful if you could tell me in the comments.
Also, anyone else watching "Agents of SHIELD"? I greatly enjoy it!
