new jobs, new genres
While waiting for the cable guy to show up, I might as well start this post.
A call arrived for Robin at about 9:40. It was Joanne at the medical clinic in West Van, getting Robin out of bed to offer her a job. Last night's interview, which Robin felt had gone poorly, not so much because of her performance as because of its brevity, the seeming lack of strong engagement on the part of Joanne and the doctor conducting it, and Robin's lack of opportunity to draw attention to her strengths (organizational ability, love of kids, making the dean's list). Wrong. They want her and when can they have her? Robin padded down the stairs to my office to tell me. I leaned back, smiled, and congratulated her; I felt great for her, and forthwith invited her out to a celebratoy lunch--after the cable guy has come and gone.
I was off to a bumpy start trying to get back into drafting chapter 17. I also had to phone our strata's lawyer about the latest twist in the road in our ongoing dealings with one owner who won't respect our parking bylaws. I'll have to draft a letter on that. Kimmie also wanted me to respond to an e-mail that she'd sent me to see what I thought of a draft e-mail she was sending to a coworker who'd upset her. Meanwhile, on the boulevard that divides the north and south sides of Keith Road outside our house, a paving crew was at work with their rumbling, beeping machinery, laying asphalt on the winding strip they've built into the grass. The $7.1-million paving project goes by the name of the Green Necklace: an eventually continuous band of bikable, rollerskatable asphalt around the core of North Vancouver City. Goodbye grass. Goodbye money.
In short, I found my mind jostled by externals, and it was correspondingly hard to get into the writing flow. I nudged myself forward 2 pages.
But I wanted to say something about one of the Grumpy Old Bookman's posts today, about literary genres. I've brought up the topic myself in a previous post, and wanted to add further thoughts.
Woops--the cable guy showed, and, with some difficulty, did manage to install a cable outlet in Robin's room. (He assured me that the degradation of our cable signal would not be too bad! When I pressed him for clarity he said things like, "you won't notice it.") Then I took Robin out to lunch at Ricky's Diner in celebration of her new job. We both had the "everything" omelette. I dropped her at her old apartment, where she was meeting Trevor to do the final cleanup before carpet-cleaning tomorrow.
Had to draft that letter, now I'm back.
Where was I. GOB brings up the issue of literary fiction, for which perhaps there's no universally accepted definition (how about this: "noncommercial fiction that some publishers get excited enough about to publish"). Fiction offered as "literary" tends to be material that more or less self-consciously flouts one or more "conventions". In the case of Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days, which I've not read, it seems that the conventions are those of the "noir thriller" and science fiction. The author relies on the convention, but, supposedly, rises above it by breaking its "rules".
Maybe, sometimes, this can be OK. Usually it makes for a tedious read (I have to give props to GOB for his determination in reading all the way through a book he doesn't like--something I cannot do, except, maybe, for pay. Maybe.). Why? I believe it's because genre conventions are structurally stable: they exist because they have an inherent power with audiences (or readerships). In other words, the genre conventions contain the equivalent of releasing mechanisms for emotional energy in the audience; they speak to us in some deep way, triggering feelings. It's largely for this experience that we turn to stories in the first place. The genres exist because they've been proven to work.
That being said, a story that merely checks the boxes of a genre, like the great majority of books published as "category fiction", is, to me, boring. Romance, mystery, sci-fi--they're all yawners to me, for the most part. The releasing mechanism is not working on me, and, I suspect, on many others. Hence I'm not a consumer of category fiction, and I have no desire to write it.
The way forward, I think, is not merely to urinate on genre conventions, but to make creative use of them, not trashing them but bending them in ways dictated by one's own inner creative impulses. It should be controlled, minimal, and organic. Consider the movie western: a time-honored genre that in the old days featured chaste, virtuous gunslingers protecting defenseless townspeople and virtuous saloon girls from marauding outlaws. Fast-forward to 1991 and Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, a story that rearranges these elements into an altogether different configuration--one that spoke to the audience of the 1990s. It wasn't a matter of flouting convention, but of creative bending of it to lead the audience to a new place, one that has even more emotional impact on them than the older, now stale convention.
Thus, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was a maturation or coming-of-age plot, but the type and quality of maturation that Joyce was depicting was not what the other practitioners of the genre had ever envisioned. It was fiction as literary as you could wish for, and also a powerfully told story that struck deeply into not just the reader's conceptual mind, but somewhere nearer his or her core.
So, yes, most fiction now presented as "literary" is, to me, a pretentious bore. But so is category fiction (minus the pretension). The way forward, in the sense of telling stories that will really make people feel things, think things, is, I believe, to use the genre conventions, but to use them creatively, questioningly, rather than slavishly. Our attraction to a particular genre shows that it's already speaking to us. As writers we need to find how to speak through it in turn--how to piggyback our deepest feelings and thoughts onto an already working vehicle, and in so doing, modify it to our needs.
As a reader this is what I want, and what I generally can't get.
A call arrived for Robin at about 9:40. It was Joanne at the medical clinic in West Van, getting Robin out of bed to offer her a job. Last night's interview, which Robin felt had gone poorly, not so much because of her performance as because of its brevity, the seeming lack of strong engagement on the part of Joanne and the doctor conducting it, and Robin's lack of opportunity to draw attention to her strengths (organizational ability, love of kids, making the dean's list). Wrong. They want her and when can they have her? Robin padded down the stairs to my office to tell me. I leaned back, smiled, and congratulated her; I felt great for her, and forthwith invited her out to a celebratoy lunch--after the cable guy has come and gone.
I was off to a bumpy start trying to get back into drafting chapter 17. I also had to phone our strata's lawyer about the latest twist in the road in our ongoing dealings with one owner who won't respect our parking bylaws. I'll have to draft a letter on that. Kimmie also wanted me to respond to an e-mail that she'd sent me to see what I thought of a draft e-mail she was sending to a coworker who'd upset her. Meanwhile, on the boulevard that divides the north and south sides of Keith Road outside our house, a paving crew was at work with their rumbling, beeping machinery, laying asphalt on the winding strip they've built into the grass. The $7.1-million paving project goes by the name of the Green Necklace: an eventually continuous band of bikable, rollerskatable asphalt around the core of North Vancouver City. Goodbye grass. Goodbye money.
In short, I found my mind jostled by externals, and it was correspondingly hard to get into the writing flow. I nudged myself forward 2 pages.
But I wanted to say something about one of the Grumpy Old Bookman's posts today, about literary genres. I've brought up the topic myself in a previous post, and wanted to add further thoughts.
Woops--the cable guy showed, and, with some difficulty, did manage to install a cable outlet in Robin's room. (He assured me that the degradation of our cable signal would not be too bad! When I pressed him for clarity he said things like, "you won't notice it.") Then I took Robin out to lunch at Ricky's Diner in celebration of her new job. We both had the "everything" omelette. I dropped her at her old apartment, where she was meeting Trevor to do the final cleanup before carpet-cleaning tomorrow.
Had to draft that letter, now I'm back.
Where was I. GOB brings up the issue of literary fiction, for which perhaps there's no universally accepted definition (how about this: "noncommercial fiction that some publishers get excited enough about to publish"). Fiction offered as "literary" tends to be material that more or less self-consciously flouts one or more "conventions". In the case of Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days, which I've not read, it seems that the conventions are those of the "noir thriller" and science fiction. The author relies on the convention, but, supposedly, rises above it by breaking its "rules".
Maybe, sometimes, this can be OK. Usually it makes for a tedious read (I have to give props to GOB for his determination in reading all the way through a book he doesn't like--something I cannot do, except, maybe, for pay. Maybe.). Why? I believe it's because genre conventions are structurally stable: they exist because they have an inherent power with audiences (or readerships). In other words, the genre conventions contain the equivalent of releasing mechanisms for emotional energy in the audience; they speak to us in some deep way, triggering feelings. It's largely for this experience that we turn to stories in the first place. The genres exist because they've been proven to work.
That being said, a story that merely checks the boxes of a genre, like the great majority of books published as "category fiction", is, to me, boring. Romance, mystery, sci-fi--they're all yawners to me, for the most part. The releasing mechanism is not working on me, and, I suspect, on many others. Hence I'm not a consumer of category fiction, and I have no desire to write it.
The way forward, I think, is not merely to urinate on genre conventions, but to make creative use of them, not trashing them but bending them in ways dictated by one's own inner creative impulses. It should be controlled, minimal, and organic. Consider the movie western: a time-honored genre that in the old days featured chaste, virtuous gunslingers protecting defenseless townspeople and virtuous saloon girls from marauding outlaws. Fast-forward to 1991 and Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, a story that rearranges these elements into an altogether different configuration--one that spoke to the audience of the 1990s. It wasn't a matter of flouting convention, but of creative bending of it to lead the audience to a new place, one that has even more emotional impact on them than the older, now stale convention.
Thus, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was a maturation or coming-of-age plot, but the type and quality of maturation that Joyce was depicting was not what the other practitioners of the genre had ever envisioned. It was fiction as literary as you could wish for, and also a powerfully told story that struck deeply into not just the reader's conceptual mind, but somewhere nearer his or her core.
So, yes, most fiction now presented as "literary" is, to me, a pretentious bore. But so is category fiction (minus the pretension). The way forward, in the sense of telling stories that will really make people feel things, think things, is, I believe, to use the genre conventions, but to use them creatively, questioningly, rather than slavishly. Our attraction to a particular genre shows that it's already speaking to us. As writers we need to find how to speak through it in turn--how to piggyback our deepest feelings and thoughts onto an already working vehicle, and in so doing, modify it to our needs.
As a reader this is what I want, and what I generally can't get.
posted by paulv at
4:21 PM
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