“Madeleine Robins said,
August 7, 2006 at 7:33 pm

…Reading these posts, I keep hearing a line from Emily Dickinson about telling truth but telling it slant. Good fiction gets at truth by sneaking round the back way, entertaining you while planting mines that go off in the reader’s head later on.”

This reminds of something a former co-worker once said. “Humor is the truth, only faster.” I think something similar might be said of good fiction.

As a writer, I worry about writing cliche and flabbiness. I have read some of the lists of cliches that are about on the blogs right now, and my trilogy committed many. I wonder if I did something new with them, or if it was derivative and poorly done. I hope it was done well enough, and that it was a good story, that touched readers on some level. I hope the story entertained.

But I know that I struggled with words and sentences, trying to stretch myself, and stretch the story, while still keeping true to the kind of story that I love to read. It is, I think, a good concern to have as a writer, though I’m sure that if we all worried about whether what we were writing was worth anything, we’d at some point do what I saw on Grey’s Anatomy last night, and eat our fat novels and get it stuck in our intestines and end up with mercury poisoning to boot.

Di

It’s not just the reader who gets flabby, it’s the creator, too. When I was editing comics, a thing I heard with depressing frequency from my writers (and even more depressingly from some of my fellow editors) was “the kids’ll love it.” Which was short hand for “it doesn’t have to make sense, it’s sparkly,” or “so what if this has been done to death, it still works.”

Yes — this is a huge beef of mine, as well. When I come across lazy prose or storytelling, I think, Jeez, guy, stretch yourself a little! Same thing with movies.

I heard this great quote the other day from a musician on a show celebrating the anniversary of the release of the Beatles’ Revolver album. They were talking about some of the musical risks the Beatles pulled off in that album, and the musician being interviewed said, “Their work reminds me to take risks, to stretch myself.”

Or as Chairman Bruce once put it, embrace your weird.

-l.

A work that merely recycles tropes, places, character-types, cliches, etc., requires little reader participation. It’s like working out with styrofoam weights–looks good, builds no muscle.

It’s not just the reader who gets flabby, it’s the creator, too. When I was editing comics, a thing I heard with depressing frequency from my writers (and even more depressingly from some of my fellow editors) was “the kids’ll love it.” Which was short hand for “it doesn’t have to make sense, it’s sparkly,” or “so what if this has been done to death, it still works.” At the same time these people were awed by the work of the people who were doing heavy lifting: Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis, writers whose work was “sparkly” and at the same time dense with stuff–ideas, quirks, references to things outside the genre.

Reading these posts, I keep hearing a line from Emily Dickinson about telling truth but telling it slant. Good fiction gets at truth by sneaking round the back way, entertaining you while planting mines that go off in the reader’s head later on.

What film doesn’t do for us, which is demand we build the world described. Reading is participatory.

Yes!!! That’s a point I want to underscore. It relates back to the ongoing skirmishes anent Lois’s “Genre don’t want no respect” post, too, as far as defining what Crap Fiction is. A work that merely recycles tropes, places, character-types, cliches etc requires little reader participation. It’s like working out with styrofoam weights — looks good, builds no muscle.

I never needed to be told that fiction saved lives. During ten years of profound indiagnosed depression, books were what kept me from doing something drastic and permanent. I could live for a few hours in someone else’s world, with someone else’s problems. Those problems might be easier or harder than mine to deal with, but generally the protagonist managed to deal with them. In the few instances where they didn’t, the end result was…unfortunate. Without that outside perspective I seriously doubt I would have survived to adulthood.

Carol