This is really fascinating, Matthew. I'm similar with my reading habits, and about 6 years ago ended up significantly widening my bookshelves due to a job I was doing at the time which was tangential to the publishing industry. Reading stuff like Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent, Washington Black by Esi Edugyan and lots of others really made me realise that my frame of reference had been really small.
What you highlight is also spot on: as genre writers it's easy to say that we have the biggest, most flexible toolkit. That literary fiction is boxed in due to being generally set in the modern, real world. The difference, I suppose, is that the innovation and boundary-pushing comes in the ideas and settings in genre stuff - whereas literary fiction has to find that innovation in other places, such as the prose itself. Generalising there, of course.
I have had a desire for a while now to have a go at writing something that is clearly speculative in its setup, but which is structured and delivered more like a literary fiction novel. Haven't quite found the right material yet, and not sure whether I'm quite there in terms of ability either.
Really enjoyed this. I feel like the stranglehold of "show don't tell" is only starting to fall off even in literary fiction. I wonder if it has to do with fiction changing so much and so radically in the 20th century; maybe we cobbled together these "hard and fast rules" in a panic of trying to impose a new standard form, and we're only just now realizing that they don't have that much real relevancy. After all, whether we're writing SFF or mainstream fiction, what we really want is to tell good stories, not compose perfect specimens of an arbitrary set of technical rules we may not even agree with.
I have come to the conclusion that I should be marketing more to literary and commercial readers than genre. My latest entry into a genre contest, with genre reviewers, ended up with the reviewers being puzzled about what it really was...well, I do write a lot of interiority.
As a SFF writer writing a new contemporary novel, this resonates. My current feeling is this:
1) Don't let "show vs tell" get in the way of a good story. If you are trying to show something that is difficult to show well, you run the risk of just adding verbose prose and it getting in the way of the story. Tell, and move on. In figuring this out, I tend to see "show" scenes as ways to make the reader feel something. "Tell" scenes are ways to glue the story to its next conclusion. Sometimes, the latter is more important: to get on with it.
2) If tell is too flat, first show, then tell. eg "Emma threw the trashcan across the room. She was furious!"
Like you, I inhaled a bunch of science fiction in my teens in the 80s, and it made up a decent chunk of the fiction I read later in life, but I've also read a bunch of random stuff because before the internet, I ended up reading a lot of stuff I just lying around.
I've read many works of fiction that were definitely not science fiction, but I don't recall reading anything that seems like it was set in the real world. The setting of every novel is the writer's impression of the world. When a story is supposedly set in a contemporary or a historical setting from living memory, it's a funhouse mirror version of the real world. It's reality tweaked to reflect the author's own passions, prejudices, ambitions and preoccupations. I'm sure some authors strive to get as much reality onto the page as they can, but many (most?) don't even try.
The tweet from Jeff VanderMeer about how his books sell varying on where their "shelved" was a missive from another universe. I live in a rural town of 5,000. There are no bookstores here. There's a library, but I never go in and browse the shelves. If a book comes to my attention through my cable modem, I'll do a search of the library's online catalog and see if I can get my hands on a copy without coughing up any dough. The experience of browsing actual physical shelves in a literal bookstore is an experience from a previous life.
I think the language of SFF is often constrained by its ties to TV/movies -- authors writing novels as if they're screenplays. This can work to great effect, but that depends on the needs of the story, and it's often just used as the default. This is particularly jarring (to me) in Fantasy, which has its roots in Tolkien and ancient mythology, decidedly non-cinematic forms of writing.
Such a great essay (sorry for the delayed response).
I wonder if part of the unshackling in "Real Lit" or "Lit Fic" techniques is a necessary counter-balance to the uncoupling between story and meaning? For me, it seems like the most highly-regarded Lit Fic stories all have one things in common: a sort of nihilistic vagueness. So, since they aren't forced to adhere to telling a story, they are left with a lot of space in which to experiment with language and expressionistic scene-setting. And then that becomes the metric by which they're measured?
If my theory is true, then Grimdark SFF should probably also be more experimental in its techniques. But, I'll never know. I don't read any (the closest I've ever gotten is SRD, like the Gap Series...and, even then, he tends to permit redemption and have philosophical closure in his plots).
This is really fascinating, Matthew. I'm similar with my reading habits, and about 6 years ago ended up significantly widening my bookshelves due to a job I was doing at the time which was tangential to the publishing industry. Reading stuff like Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent, Washington Black by Esi Edugyan and lots of others really made me realise that my frame of reference had been really small.
What you highlight is also spot on: as genre writers it's easy to say that we have the biggest, most flexible toolkit. That literary fiction is boxed in due to being generally set in the modern, real world. The difference, I suppose, is that the innovation and boundary-pushing comes in the ideas and settings in genre stuff - whereas literary fiction has to find that innovation in other places, such as the prose itself. Generalising there, of course.
I have had a desire for a while now to have a go at writing something that is clearly speculative in its setup, but which is structured and delivered more like a literary fiction novel. Haven't quite found the right material yet, and not sure whether I'm quite there in terms of ability either.
Thanks, have subscribed! 👍
Really enjoyed this. I feel like the stranglehold of "show don't tell" is only starting to fall off even in literary fiction. I wonder if it has to do with fiction changing so much and so radically in the 20th century; maybe we cobbled together these "hard and fast rules" in a panic of trying to impose a new standard form, and we're only just now realizing that they don't have that much real relevancy. After all, whether we're writing SFF or mainstream fiction, what we really want is to tell good stories, not compose perfect specimens of an arbitrary set of technical rules we may not even agree with.
I have come to the conclusion that I should be marketing more to literary and commercial readers than genre. My latest entry into a genre contest, with genre reviewers, ended up with the reviewers being puzzled about what it really was...well, I do write a lot of interiority.
As a SFF writer writing a new contemporary novel, this resonates. My current feeling is this:
1) Don't let "show vs tell" get in the way of a good story. If you are trying to show something that is difficult to show well, you run the risk of just adding verbose prose and it getting in the way of the story. Tell, and move on. In figuring this out, I tend to see "show" scenes as ways to make the reader feel something. "Tell" scenes are ways to glue the story to its next conclusion. Sometimes, the latter is more important: to get on with it.
2) If tell is too flat, first show, then tell. eg "Emma threw the trashcan across the room. She was furious!"
Like you, I inhaled a bunch of science fiction in my teens in the 80s, and it made up a decent chunk of the fiction I read later in life, but I've also read a bunch of random stuff because before the internet, I ended up reading a lot of stuff I just lying around.
I've read many works of fiction that were definitely not science fiction, but I don't recall reading anything that seems like it was set in the real world. The setting of every novel is the writer's impression of the world. When a story is supposedly set in a contemporary or a historical setting from living memory, it's a funhouse mirror version of the real world. It's reality tweaked to reflect the author's own passions, prejudices, ambitions and preoccupations. I'm sure some authors strive to get as much reality onto the page as they can, but many (most?) don't even try.
The tweet from Jeff VanderMeer about how his books sell varying on where their "shelved" was a missive from another universe. I live in a rural town of 5,000. There are no bookstores here. There's a library, but I never go in and browse the shelves. If a book comes to my attention through my cable modem, I'll do a search of the library's online catalog and see if I can get my hands on a copy without coughing up any dough. The experience of browsing actual physical shelves in a literal bookstore is an experience from a previous life.
I think the language of SFF is often constrained by its ties to TV/movies -- authors writing novels as if they're screenplays. This can work to great effect, but that depends on the needs of the story, and it's often just used as the default. This is particularly jarring (to me) in Fantasy, which has its roots in Tolkien and ancient mythology, decidedly non-cinematic forms of writing.
Such a great essay (sorry for the delayed response).
I wonder if part of the unshackling in "Real Lit" or "Lit Fic" techniques is a necessary counter-balance to the uncoupling between story and meaning? For me, it seems like the most highly-regarded Lit Fic stories all have one things in common: a sort of nihilistic vagueness. So, since they aren't forced to adhere to telling a story, they are left with a lot of space in which to experiment with language and expressionistic scene-setting. And then that becomes the metric by which they're measured?
If my theory is true, then Grimdark SFF should probably also be more experimental in its techniques. But, I'll never know. I don't read any (the closest I've ever gotten is SRD, like the Gap Series...and, even then, he tends to permit redemption and have philosophical closure in his plots).