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kaigouI think it's not just that fanfiction rests (in part) upon a ground of potential plausibility; I think it also works within a framework that's similar enough to original fiction that this gives the impression that one should be able to make the leap quite easily: genre assumptions. That is, fanfiction has canon assumptions which are closely analogous to genre assumptions, so you'd just be trading one for the other. When the author is familiar with the concept of shortcuts, after that it's simply a matter of learning what they are for any given genre.
And since I wouldn't mention it unless I find that a problem, it's that both are cop-outs. They're a way to treat the underpinnings of fiction as superfluous and extract them one by one, until the work feels almost hollow. (Not unlike the non-load-bearing wall in my dining room with studs at 36" on center. It's not to code, though it won't make the house fall down, but it sure makes putting up shelves damn difficult.)
In a story example, this isn't unlike the complaint I had about a historical fiction work wherein there wasn't a single mention of fashion, politics, or technology to give me even a generalized idea of when the story took place. It consisted almost entirely of an emotional conflict resting on a pile of short-cuts. It's even worse than 36" on center studs; it's a house where the walls are made of paper hung from wires stretched between poles: it may be pretty, but there's nothing there, really, to ground it to this place and this time. A decent breeze -- or a decent plothole -- and it'll all come crashing down.
Slight tangent: the notion of structural underpinnings got me thinking, in turn, about instances where I've been able to compare an author's work when the author writes in several genres. (For the most part, the author's approach, technique, sensibilities, stay generally even, which makes deconstructive analysis much easier than comparing cross-author in the same genre.) In a not-this-world fantasy story, there's a lot of world-building required if the not-this-world isn't a direct or semi-direct analogue to our own (similar tech, land masses, cultures, fashion, etc). This world-building acts as one of the integral structural components of the fiction, and the more deft an engineer be the writer, the more heft the story seems to have. (And thus we realize that 'doorstop tome' is a label both physical and metaphorical.)
The result, then, is that the story's close leaves me with the impression -- as one of those readers who can't freaking turn off my brain -- that the story somehow has more to it. It's akin to standing in the great hall of a castle and asking yourself: how did they build that ceiling? Really, how did they do that? If what structure the reader can see is impressive, double that when it implies there's even more under the surface: that's the implications of fiction's underpinnings... even if I am a wierdo for thinking of it in engineering terms.
To take an architectural tangent, because I don't want anyone getting the wrong impression in the comparison, the reason we may see century-old cathedrals as phenomenal works of engineering is because (a) they're unfamiliar to us as an everyday event, (b) we've probably never been around one as it was constructed to see its inner prior to being wrapped in an outer, and underneath it all, (c) those cathedrals, castles, and the like were built without advanced mathematics. I mean, honestly, calculus and the all-powerful derivative aren't even a century older than my own freaking country! (Yes, William & Mary College in Virginia was founded only four years after Isaac Newton published his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Imagine that.)
But if you've ever seen a Mies Van der Rohe skyscraper, you'd realize that our modern architecture -- analogue to this-world genres of cyberpunk, urban fantasy, steampunk -- is pretty damn impressive in its own right. The engineering and mathematics that go into creating a steel and concrete structure that rises thirty stories into the sky and yet is wrapped in little more than a bit of steel and football-fields of glass... well, that's nothing to sniff at. Hell, just the usual suburban home has some pretty amazing engineering within its walls, but we dismiss it because we see it everyday and have grown used to the idea that balloon-framing is pretty ordinary -- to the point that now, to build a post-and-beam house, is considered radical, and something to remark on.
Essentially, you could say that in trad-fantasy the author-engineer is building without calculus, doing the math long-hand to make sure the structure doesn't fall down: creating culture, language, laws, ethics, technology, even genders and species. In this-world genres, the author-engineer is using already-available structural supports. It's not a matter of coming up with a new steel or a new type of glass, so much as using the familiar in a breathtakingly unusual or daring way.
And to drive this analogy completely into the ground, authors may alternate between them, building something long-hand that's ready-made, like artisans building post-and-beam houses instead of using studs and drywall. It doesn't always work, though, and it's the why that I think some authors don't address, too busy thinking it's radical somehow to mix the old with the new (or in trad-fantasy, the new with the old). Structural elements include the story's concept of, say, colonialism. Where once it was accepted that colonialism had a positive benefit (of civilizing the natives) that outweighed its exploitative aspects, now you're more likely to find stories that posit colonialist bad, noble savage good.
The review that started me reading the ferretbrain critiqued that story as flipping good-bad structure on its head and ending up with "colonial good, native ignorant and in need of civilizing colonial influence". Not really an improvement, and more to my analogy's point: somewhat like thinking you'll build this part of your house long-hand as a way to make it unique -- but not realizing that there's a really good reason we stopped using horsehair and plaster to insulate our houses. Sure, this bit of structure may be different from the suburban homes flooding the market, but different does not automatically mean better.
But wait! I just realized I can drive (deconstruct?) this analogy even farther into its foundations. Asaishuu replied to my earlier post, "God help me if you try to convince me a "saucy" woman would ever be conceived of as attractive to a Lord of the Manor" -- except that I know for certain that my great-grandmother was described as saucy, and she was married three times. (Widowed all three times, too.) It's just that what we modern-minds think of as "saucy" or "sassy" isn't quite the same thing -- or more like, it's exactly the same but only on the surface.
Think again to the horsehair-and-plaster versus drywall. Both, done by an expert, can end up beautifully and perfectly smooth and white, and both can then be painted with lime-wash, or oil-based paint, or even latex (though latex, not so good for the plaster, if you're wondering, but that's neither here nor there). On the surface, you have a smooth interior wall, just as on the surface you have a head-strong woman who speaks her mind. It's what's underneath, what makes her possible -- the source of her behavior/character -- that is almost totally opposite between historical and modern. That, I think, is where a lazy historical writer undermines their story: if you don't realize the fundamental underlying differences even when the external appearance is identical, then you're going to miss all the tiny tells that let a savvy person know that all you've really done is take a modern structure and slap some gingerbread on it and call it Victorian, or slap some mud on it and call it adobe, or slap a corset and a fichu on it and call it Regency. You're not fooling anyone, y'know.
Anyway.
Setting aside the issue of then-structures with now-structures, if the genre rests in our own world -- like urban fantasy, or super-spy-thrillers, or mysteries, or contemporary romances -- the author doesn't even necessarily need genre-shortcuts, given then real-world shortcuts already at his/her disposal. There's no need to tell me what a car is, or why someone might freak out at a call from the IRS. One might say these underpinnings already exist, a kind of socio-cultural framework the author can preempt to use in his/her own work, but it's not like these are considered integral to the story-structure.
To me, these underpinnings are best considered external to the story. They're holding the story up from the outside, rather than from within. It's like looking at the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris, where nearly the entire engineering structure of the building exists outside the building. It's not hidden within the walls; there's no mystery about it. Okay, if we're talking modern architecture, that statement is debatable, but if we're saying this on the grounds that "when you can see how things are put together, it's not mysterious," then no, there's no mystery to a structure where the architectural and engineering underpinnings are actually designed as overpinnings.
Or more precisely, it's not that the structure is like the Pompidou, so much as the story hangs from the existing elements rather than is built on an interior framework of elements. That's a somewhat post-modernist view, as well, but I'm having trouble finding any better way to put why I frequently find a lot of urban fantasy to be hollow, in a kind of no-real-substance sense. The things that make the story hold together are things I already know, so the ramifications of a story's outcome don't really require this specific story to highlight them; any story, really, could hang from that combination and thus outline the space between. [More on this in a bit, since I half-dropped this thread & meant to clarify.]
But not always, and if the trad-fantasy where the author must build all the engineering from the ground up is a story that seems to have massive heft and substance, the value of a modern-based story (or an extrapolated futuristic story) is to do precisely the opposite: to create a story within the existing limitations of our world (including culture, race, gender, and so on) and to reveal the gaps between these structural elements. It's a kind of parallax, really: what from outside the Pompidou Centre looks kinda awkward and near-brutal is pretty freaking amazing from the inside.
(Hell, I was there because my hosts wanted to see an exhibit, but I spent the entire time at the Pompidou staring at the ceiling, the walls, the floor, and then ended up at the windows, looking out to see everything that should've been within -- in some ways, moving everything to the visible outside doesn't make the interior more dramatic by opening up the space, but makes the overall design even more obtrusive for the lack of expected internal solidity -- sort of like me reading that historical fiction and so busy actively looking for any historical place-in-time references that I stopped really paying attention to the story itself.)
When we talk about issues of racism or sexism or classism, there's often a parallel discussion about intersectionality -- like where one's ethnicity may allow privilege but one's disabilities or gender in turn reduces privilege. That concept of intersectionality is what can make this-world stories, of a variety of genres, so incredibly powerful, when they place us within this previous empty or unidentified space (the intersection between certain aspects of our reality) and show us a view we'd previously overlooked.
That's one reason I retain a fondness for the original Star Trek despite its shortcomings and/or dated-ness, such as the way Star Trek used the "alien culture" formula to reflect back upon political and social questions of the day. ST:TNG toyed with this formula at times (not enough for my tastes, though), like in its two-parter that tackled whether Data was a machine and thus a possession, or whether he had sentience, and if so, what is sentience and what does it mean to be human? These are questions hard to ask in the everyday world, where we have no near-sentient machine. That's where SFF can do some amazing mind-expanding stuff.
But this also applies on a much smaller scale. Ironically (or not), it's another ferretbrain review that got me on this one, this time Dan Hemmon's comparison of BtVS and Harry Potter, in When Harry Met Buffy:
Somewhere in my head is a good summation of how that fits my point about structures external to a story, but I just finished dinner and I wanna just chill for a bit, so I'll leave it at this and pick the next points up when I get around to it again. Probably after more contemplation, since obviously I'm not done here. Most stuff is still standing, after all.
And since I wouldn't mention it unless I find that a problem, it's that both are cop-outs. They're a way to treat the underpinnings of fiction as superfluous and extract them one by one, until the work feels almost hollow. (Not unlike the non-load-bearing wall in my dining room with studs at 36" on center. It's not to code, though it won't make the house fall down, but it sure makes putting up shelves damn difficult.)
In a story example, this isn't unlike the complaint I had about a historical fiction work wherein there wasn't a single mention of fashion, politics, or technology to give me even a generalized idea of when the story took place. It consisted almost entirely of an emotional conflict resting on a pile of short-cuts. It's even worse than 36" on center studs; it's a house where the walls are made of paper hung from wires stretched between poles: it may be pretty, but there's nothing there, really, to ground it to this place and this time. A decent breeze -- or a decent plothole -- and it'll all come crashing down.
Slight tangent: the notion of structural underpinnings got me thinking, in turn, about instances where I've been able to compare an author's work when the author writes in several genres. (For the most part, the author's approach, technique, sensibilities, stay generally even, which makes deconstructive analysis much easier than comparing cross-author in the same genre.) In a not-this-world fantasy story, there's a lot of world-building required if the not-this-world isn't a direct or semi-direct analogue to our own (similar tech, land masses, cultures, fashion, etc). This world-building acts as one of the integral structural components of the fiction, and the more deft an engineer be the writer, the more heft the story seems to have. (And thus we realize that 'doorstop tome' is a label both physical and metaphorical.)
The result, then, is that the story's close leaves me with the impression -- as one of those readers who can't freaking turn off my brain -- that the story somehow has more to it. It's akin to standing in the great hall of a castle and asking yourself: how did they build that ceiling? Really, how did they do that? If what structure the reader can see is impressive, double that when it implies there's even more under the surface: that's the implications of fiction's underpinnings... even if I am a wierdo for thinking of it in engineering terms.
To take an architectural tangent, because I don't want anyone getting the wrong impression in the comparison, the reason we may see century-old cathedrals as phenomenal works of engineering is because (a) they're unfamiliar to us as an everyday event, (b) we've probably never been around one as it was constructed to see its inner prior to being wrapped in an outer, and underneath it all, (c) those cathedrals, castles, and the like were built without advanced mathematics. I mean, honestly, calculus and the all-powerful derivative aren't even a century older than my own freaking country! (Yes, William & Mary College in Virginia was founded only four years after Isaac Newton published his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Imagine that.)
But if you've ever seen a Mies Van der Rohe skyscraper, you'd realize that our modern architecture -- analogue to this-world genres of cyberpunk, urban fantasy, steampunk -- is pretty damn impressive in its own right. The engineering and mathematics that go into creating a steel and concrete structure that rises thirty stories into the sky and yet is wrapped in little more than a bit of steel and football-fields of glass... well, that's nothing to sniff at. Hell, just the usual suburban home has some pretty amazing engineering within its walls, but we dismiss it because we see it everyday and have grown used to the idea that balloon-framing is pretty ordinary -- to the point that now, to build a post-and-beam house, is considered radical, and something to remark on.
Essentially, you could say that in trad-fantasy the author-engineer is building without calculus, doing the math long-hand to make sure the structure doesn't fall down: creating culture, language, laws, ethics, technology, even genders and species. In this-world genres, the author-engineer is using already-available structural supports. It's not a matter of coming up with a new steel or a new type of glass, so much as using the familiar in a breathtakingly unusual or daring way.
And to drive this analogy completely into the ground, authors may alternate between them, building something long-hand that's ready-made, like artisans building post-and-beam houses instead of using studs and drywall. It doesn't always work, though, and it's the why that I think some authors don't address, too busy thinking it's radical somehow to mix the old with the new (or in trad-fantasy, the new with the old). Structural elements include the story's concept of, say, colonialism. Where once it was accepted that colonialism had a positive benefit (of civilizing the natives) that outweighed its exploitative aspects, now you're more likely to find stories that posit colonialist bad, noble savage good.
The review that started me reading the ferretbrain critiqued that story as flipping good-bad structure on its head and ending up with "colonial good, native ignorant and in need of civilizing colonial influence". Not really an improvement, and more to my analogy's point: somewhat like thinking you'll build this part of your house long-hand as a way to make it unique -- but not realizing that there's a really good reason we stopped using horsehair and plaster to insulate our houses. Sure, this bit of structure may be different from the suburban homes flooding the market, but different does not automatically mean better.
But wait! I just realized I can drive (deconstruct?) this analogy even farther into its foundations. As
aishuu replied to my earlier post, "God help me if you try to convince me a "saucy" woman would ever be conceived of as attractive to a Lord of the Manor" -- except that I know for certain that my great-grandmother was described as saucy, and she was married three times. (Widowed all three times, too.) It's just that what we modern-minds think of as "saucy" or "sassy" isn't quite the same thing -- or more like, it's exactly the same but only on the surface. Think again to the horsehair-and-plaster versus drywall. Both, done by an expert, can end up beautifully and perfectly smooth and white, and both can then be painted with lime-wash, or oil-based paint, or even latex (though latex, not so good for the plaster, if you're wondering, but that's neither here nor there). On the surface, you have a smooth interior wall, just as on the surface you have a head-strong woman who speaks her mind. It's what's underneath, what makes her possible -- the source of her behavior/character -- that is almost totally opposite between historical and modern. That, I think, is where a lazy historical writer undermines their story: if you don't realize the fundamental underlying differences even when the external appearance is identical, then you're going to miss all the tiny tells that let a savvy person know that all you've really done is take a modern structure and slap some gingerbread on it and call it Victorian, or slap some mud on it and call it adobe, or slap a corset and a fichu on it and call it Regency. You're not fooling anyone, y'know.
Anyway.
Setting aside the issue of then-structures with now-structures, if the genre rests in our own world -- like urban fantasy, or super-spy-thrillers, or mysteries, or contemporary romances -- the author doesn't even necessarily need genre-shortcuts, given then real-world shortcuts already at his/her disposal. There's no need to tell me what a car is, or why someone might freak out at a call from the IRS. One might say these underpinnings already exist, a kind of socio-cultural framework the author can preempt to use in his/her own work, but it's not like these are considered integral to the story-structure.
To me, these underpinnings are best considered external to the story. They're holding the story up from the outside, rather than from within. It's like looking at the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris, where nearly the entire engineering structure of the building exists outside the building. It's not hidden within the walls; there's no mystery about it. Okay, if we're talking modern architecture, that statement is debatable, but if we're saying this on the grounds that "when you can see how things are put together, it's not mysterious," then no, there's no mystery to a structure where the architectural and engineering underpinnings are actually designed as overpinnings.
Or more precisely, it's not that the structure is like the Pompidou, so much as the story hangs from the existing elements rather than is built on an interior framework of elements. That's a somewhat post-modernist view, as well, but I'm having trouble finding any better way to put why I frequently find a lot of urban fantasy to be hollow, in a kind of no-real-substance sense. The things that make the story hold together are things I already know, so the ramifications of a story's outcome don't really require this specific story to highlight them; any story, really, could hang from that combination and thus outline the space between. [More on this in a bit, since I half-dropped this thread & meant to clarify.]
But not always, and if the trad-fantasy where the author must build all the engineering from the ground up is a story that seems to have massive heft and substance, the value of a modern-based story (or an extrapolated futuristic story) is to do precisely the opposite: to create a story within the existing limitations of our world (including culture, race, gender, and so on) and to reveal the gaps between these structural elements. It's a kind of parallax, really: what from outside the Pompidou Centre looks kinda awkward and near-brutal is pretty freaking amazing from the inside.
(Hell, I was there because my hosts wanted to see an exhibit, but I spent the entire time at the Pompidou staring at the ceiling, the walls, the floor, and then ended up at the windows, looking out to see everything that should've been within -- in some ways, moving everything to the visible outside doesn't make the interior more dramatic by opening up the space, but makes the overall design even more obtrusive for the lack of expected internal solidity -- sort of like me reading that historical fiction and so busy actively looking for any historical place-in-time references that I stopped really paying attention to the story itself.)
When we talk about issues of racism or sexism or classism, there's often a parallel discussion about intersectionality -- like where one's ethnicity may allow privilege but one's disabilities or gender in turn reduces privilege. That concept of intersectionality is what can make this-world stories, of a variety of genres, so incredibly powerful, when they place us within this previous empty or unidentified space (the intersection between certain aspects of our reality) and show us a view we'd previously overlooked.
That's one reason I retain a fondness for the original Star Trek despite its shortcomings and/or dated-ness, such as the way Star Trek used the "alien culture" formula to reflect back upon political and social questions of the day. ST:TNG toyed with this formula at times (not enough for my tastes, though), like in its two-parter that tackled whether Data was a machine and thus a possession, or whether he had sentience, and if so, what is sentience and what does it mean to be human? These are questions hard to ask in the everyday world, where we have no near-sentient machine. That's where SFF can do some amazing mind-expanding stuff.
But this also applies on a much smaller scale. Ironically (or not), it's another ferretbrain review that got me on this one, this time Dan Hemmon's comparison of BtVS and Harry Potter, in When Harry Met Buffy:
Buffy takes issues that its audience will be highly familiar with (academic pressure, romantic disaster, teenage insecurity) and uses the language of the supernatural to explore them in an emotionally believable way. Harry Potter, on the other hand uses real-world issues (racism, slavery, death) as a cheap way to add colour to an otherwise unconvincing fantasy world.
Somewhere in my head is a good summation of how that fits my point about structures external to a story, but I just finished dinner and I wanna just chill for a bit, so I'll leave it at this and pick the next points up when I get around to it again. Probably after more contemplation, since obviously I'm not done here. Most stuff is still standing, after all.
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Date: 20 Nov 2009 05:16 am (UTC)I'm finding your thoughts on genre and fanfiction and writing historical & SF/F particularly fascinating, since all of my books up til now have been historical, some with fantasy elements included, but definitely grounded in real places, real times, real events.
The book I'm currently wrestling with is a pure fantasy, set in a world of my own creation, and it's a clash-of-cultures tale to boot, so I'm doing a lot of world-building based on what I know of history, archaeology, cultural anthropology, and my observations of human nature.
The quote from When Harry Met Buffy really resonated with me.
And I'm too exhausted to think of anything particular intelligent to add to your musings, but I am enjoying reading them and they're giving me a lot of food for thought.
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Date: 20 Nov 2009 07:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 20 Nov 2009 06:29 am (UTC)Hmm. It's late and I've got five hours of sleep on me, so I need to think about this some more. There is definitely a fantasy element to the urban fantasy genre, which I know sounds redundant, but what I mean by fantasy is that it's a what-if scenario focused primarily on the ID-candy level, instead of actually exploring relevant ramfications in the real world. IDK.
Somewhere in my head is a good summation of how that fits my point about structures external to a story
I've got firsthand knowledge only of HP, but perhaps the difference is that in Buffy, those pressures described are inherent in the heroine's story experience as a teenage vampire slayer, and the story builds off those and plays with those. Whereas with HP, Harry is thrust into a world that forces him to directly confront racism/slavery/death - but those issues weren't immediately relevant to his initial experience as an 11-year-old orphan boy.
no subject
Date: 20 Nov 2009 06:45 am (UTC)Hrm. I'm not sure what you mean by ID-candy... as in the id-vortex?
I've got firsthand knowledge only of HP, but perhaps the difference is...
Not exactly.
It's more that in Buffy, the story's internal elements -- the supernatural -- are used to explain the world-as-we-know-it, that is, racism, sexism, and boyfriends who sleep with you and then suddenly dump you. Whereas in Harry's world, the racism, sexism, and the rest is added to the supernatural element (that is, racist wizards, sexist beasties, etc) to make the supernatural world seem more complex and thereby match the level of the world-we-know. In other words, the use of the supernatural in Buffy becomes a lens through which we view the world-we-know, while in Harry, the supernatural becomes simply a mirror of the world-we-know. One brings the picture into focus; the other passively reflects it.
Part of this is also what gets resolved and how. For both it's the supernatural that gets resolved in some way, so Buffy doesn't need to reach as far as a cure for real-world racism, so long as her story resolves the supernatural element. With Harry Potter, introducing racism into the supernatural, for instance, will fall even more flat if then the story doesn't even really offer any significant resolutions to the issue. Then you end up with a supernatural left partially unresolved, as well, because it now carries real-world baggage that's frankly unresolvable within the scope of a YA story that's bursting at the seams already.
no subject
Date: 20 Nov 2009 06:53 am (UTC)*googles that* Oh. Yeah, I think that's what I'm referring to. I've only ever heard the term ID-candy, so, uh.
It's more that in Buffy, the story's internal elements -- the supernatural -- are used to explain the world-as-we-know-it, that is, racism, sexism, and boyfriends who sleep with you and then suddenly dump you. Whereas in Harry's world, the racism, sexism, and the rest is added to the supernatural element (that is, racist wizards, sexist beasties, etc) to make the supernatural world seem more complex and thereby match the level of the world-we-know. In other words, the use of the supernatural in Buffy becomes a lens through which we view the world-we-know, while in Harry, the supernatural becomes simply a mirror of the world-we-know. One brings the picture into focus; the other passively reflects it.
Hmm, I see. So basically in HP, it's a case of Our Opreshuns R Pasteded On Yay?
no subject
Date: 20 Nov 2009 07:02 am (UTC)Bwah! Yeah, that seems to be the argument the reviewer is making.
Whether this is accurate (or one person's inaccurate perception), hard to say, because I only read the first 4 novels and just never got around to reading the rest. Lost interest, I suppose, or not enough time, or whatever. But the fundamental difference -- that of leaving real-world issues in the real-world and using the supernatural as metaphor to consider those in-world issues, vs importing real-world issues into the supernatural as a way to complexify the supernatural... that, at least, came pretty close to what I was trying to argue about the difference between a story which just references "the structures out there" as a kind of "toss this in to be more of the backdrop" versus a story that uses itself to be the lens through which we see "the structures out there" and the limitations they impose.
Man, it's hard to be philosophical this late at night.
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Date: 20 Nov 2009 02:59 pm (UTC)Agreed, which is why I held off my response until...early morning, when I am the most dead and still haven't gotten enough sleep 'cause I was kept up late reading all those fascinating analyses and reviews on the ferretbrain site! *shakes fist* But I am going to attempt to respond coherently to your comments.
a story which just references "the structures out there" as a kind of "toss this in to be more of the backdrop" versus a story that uses itself to be the lens through which we see "the structures out there" and the limitations they impose.
This is an interesting distinction - the mirror vs. the lens. I think "mirror" stories have the potential to be just as...um...not-hollow...as "lens" stories, if the "mirror" in question is more like a funhouse mirror that distorts the reflection into something interesting, at the very least. Although I think your issue is (and correct me if I'm wrong, I don't doubt I might have reading comprehension fail in my current state of mind) that mirrors don't distort the real world enough.
(Also, a little late, but I love your "It's dangerous to go alone!" Al icon. :D)
no subject
Date: 20 Nov 2009 03:53 pm (UTC)And it doesn't have to be Big Srs Issuz like racism or sexism -- it can be "coping with grief" or "losing a boyfriend" or "being confident in yourself" -- one of fiction's wonderful benefits is that it shows us people, good and bad, dealing with hard situations. All I'm doing here is trying to put my finger on why some stories feel like the only weight they carry is the emotional conflict but exist without some kind of grounding in the world (real or historical or supernatural), while other stories feel like not only are they grounded, but they also tell me something about my world -- that's what I mean by the mirror vs the lens. The mirror says nothing more than what I know, so it doesn't feel like it's adding anything per se, while the lens can sharpen or distort but both are a new perspective to me.
no subject
Date: 20 Nov 2009 04:04 pm (UTC)Yeah, I immediately thought about that upon rereading my comment, but didn't want to spam the thread.
The mirror says nothing more than what I know, so it doesn't feel like it's adding anything per se, while the lens can sharpen or distort but both are a new perspective to me.
Okay, I think I see now. I'm gonna have to think on this - I might try applying it to some of my favorite books and see what I get out of it.
no subject
Date: 20 Nov 2009 06:47 am (UTC)Which is not to say that such a story structure couldn't ever work, but that in what I recall of HP...it wasn't very introspective on that sort of thing, I think, which potentially (along with other issues) made it fall flat for some readers.
no subject
Date: 20 Nov 2009 06:58 am (UTC)At the same time, I'd have to say I also don't agree with the "she knew, he hadn't known" idea, given that Buffy's world had been relatively happy and affluent with the exception of her parent's divorce. In contrast, Harry had a much greater extent of personal misery, including awareness of death (his own parents' that is), and as a result of being the unwanted extra-child in an emotionally abusive family. Of the two, I'd say Harry was far more primed to be compassionate towards others' suffering, in contrast with Buffy, who did (to some degree) struggle at first with giving two hoots about anyone else, being a somewhat self-absorbed teenager (as most teenagers are, anyway).
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Date: 20 Nov 2009 03:01 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 28 Nov 2009 10:49 am (UTC)There's an good quote by M John Harrison, a SF writer, here:
Everyone in the contract knows exactly where they stand, & no one makes any serious attempt to convince anyone else that the events presented are true. (We are here to enjoy this story, not to pretend it’s happening.) Is it the lack of rationale & semiotic overload which makes them beautiful, the frank combination of the weird & the matter-of-fact?
Rather than saying assumptions, if you think about it as a contract, as something beneficial to both parties. Without certain things taken as given, you're going to be bombarded with far more information than you actually need, and the plot is likely to get buried. A lot of the groundwork is the same for a lot of genre novels, so this contract means it doesn't have to be constructed from scratch every time.
With SF, you may have to take as read that you can have spaceships that can travel between planets, despite the problems with speed of travel, with relatively, with the effects of the radiation in deep space on the human body. Do you really want a chapter of pseudoscience at the beginning of each book trying to justify that?
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Date: 28 Nov 2009 04:38 pm (UTC)Which just proves my point by being the exception. XD
Rather than saying assumptions, if you think about it as a contract, as something beneficial to both parties.
Except that implies an intentionality on the part of the author, to keep the reader in mind; I chose 'assumption' because it's something the author uses without always fully being aware of it. I also chose that word because of its double meaning: one, as an adoption or adaptation -- eg to assume someone else's debts -- as well as its meaning 'a thing that is presumed to be true, without proof'.
Without certain things taken as given, you're going to be bombarded with far more information than you actually need, and the plot is likely to get buried.
This is absolutely true, of course, but what I was focusing on was what, exactly, the author takes as a given. One thing fanfiction does is act as a tool for readers to analyze (sometimes without even being fully aware that's what they're doing) what the author took as a given compared to what the reader takes as a given... but that's also fodder for the next post, which I've had sitting as a draft for a few days now. Guess I should go ahead and post that up, eh.
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Date: 28 Nov 2009 05:58 pm (UTC)Ah, now I'd always think of an assumption as a conscious thing, probably because I do maths and in logic, it really has to be conscious or things start falling to pieces. I think that probably means I've been reading this post from a somewhat different angle than it was written.
I think I was trying to say that while some of the time, there are excessive omissions, a certain amount is necessary in a lot of contexts.
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Date: 19 Dec 2009 05:32 am (UTC)As for the IRS, here's another example: a friend's work in which she refers to RPG. I was absolutely baffled: what's Role-Playing Games got to do with getting ready to storm a castle? Turns out it's the common short-hand for some type of grenade. Hrm. Something-powered grenade. Whatever. I see it and I think, role-playing game! and believe me, that totally whacked my reading. She assumed that the info in her head was roughly equivalent to what's in mine, and... there, sadly, we parted ways, and I ended up giggling my way through what should've been a tense and difficult scene. Whoops.
If you mean "a certain amount is necessary" in the sense of how much a writer must explain, well, sure -- learning that balance of what's too much versus too little is one of a writer's hardest tasks, IMO. It's just that when we're talking about fandom, it's a lot easier to presume a certain amount of knowledge ahead of time, allowing for omissions that wouldn't fly in an ofic.
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Date: 28 Nov 2009 06:21 pm (UTC)So yes, I do acknowledge the point that authorial awareness of their shortcuts is not always complete; but on the other hand I do think that the preamble - the last post you made about 'potential plausibility' and the rest of the early discussion in this post - does point to the fact that both canon assumptions and genre assumptions are things that at least some writers are aware or and deploy. Thing is, if readers didn't at some level buy into these assumptions and accept them (as part of the normal author-reader contract), the story wouldn't work, period. suspension of belief would never happen and the story wouldn't activate. this is part of why there are so many readers out there who just read one genre and never move to to another; to be tutored in the conventions of another genre takes work, and most people don't read to exercise their brains; they read to relax them.
and of course there's a whole lot of work out there, both in genre and in faniction, that either utilises genre/fandom tropes and ideas to breathtaking sophistication, turns them on their heads, or achieves both at the same time (what I think of as my skyscrapers). Heck, you can take a lot of postmodern fiction as the act of disrupting normal writer-reader assumptions about mimetic, realist fiction. both writers and readers have the choice to be as lazy and unaware about genre assumptions as they like, or as knowing and sophisticated. but the difference is in how widely one reads.
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Date: 19 Dec 2009 05:41 am (UTC)It's also one reason a big piece of advice for new writers is to read everything and anything they can in the genre they want to write in -- otherwise they're going to reinvent the wheel at some point, not realizing the genre has existing shortcuts or tropes that cover that. Reminds me of way back in a crit group, some author was posting her space-opera chapters, and man was that story loaded with all the worst tropes of bad 70's SF -- you got the Marine-type hero, the shining princess who must be rescued, the stock characters right out of Star Trek, blah blah blah.
Plenty of it was obtuse enough that even I noticed, and I'm not exactly a buff of 70's SF; the more well-read critters were all, "look, this has been DONE and DONE and DONE and the genre is WAY past this by now," while the author insisted she was being cutting-edge and different and writing awesome stuff. The scariness of newbie ego aside, it did eventually come out that she'd not actually read any SF other than Gibson-styled gritty cyberpunk. In which case, I suppose a space opera would be new and different and "not like everyone else" -- but not being well-read enough, the author didn't realize there was a damn good reason no one else was writing crap like that. *eyeroll*
Then again, being so well-read also presents a problem, in that a writer can get too comfortable with the genre's modes and tropes. We may see that, as readers, in authors who just give us the same pap over and over and over but with different names, but we can also see it in new authors who seem to have hit every frickin' nerve of a trend all in their debut work -- they've had time to nail the genre's tropes and squeeze them all into one work.
Frankly, I find both equally boring. The first because s/he won't get out of hte damn loop, and the second because if the author enjoys any success, it's not a function of the author's own voice so much as being able to fiddle the tropes just-so to produce a work not unlike fanfiction in its feeding the masses. That is, there are those who will read any story by anyone of any length so long as it's A paired with B in that fandom, and there are ofic readers who sniff at fandom readers yet will proudly state that they'll read anything by anyone of any length so long as it's got vampires. Or werewolves. Or mind-readers. Or whatever is this week's fancy.
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Date: 19 Dec 2009 02:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 19 Dec 2009 05:24 am (UTC)Also, icon love!