All of us want to write something that matters.
I don’t know a single person who wakes up in the morning and says “I’m going to write an urban fantasy, just like all the other urban fantasies.”
Over the years of knowing a lot of writers, I’ve heard them talk about “this cool idea” more than once. I’ve never – okay, once, but that writer still isn’t published – heard the “cool idea” being something like “It will illuminate the injustice inherent in the human condition.”
In fact, when writers get together, either online, at cons, or in the case of my family at the dinner table, what we get is something like this “I was thinking of writing a story in this parallel world where street lights are sentient” then come details of characters, the beginning and usually something like “And then they find out they’re aliens.”
Does the street light world reflect the alien illumination cast by an invasive culture? Search me. (Use gloves.) That’s not how writers work. It simply isn’t.
Or rather, it’s not how genre writers work. For all I know there are people who DO sit around (probably in trendy coffee shops) saying something like “Zenith, my friend, I just ache to write a book about the heartbreak of psoriasis. ACHE I tell you!” However, those aren’t the sort of people I’d talk to, and I suspect they’re not the sort of people who write books, you know, with words in them. They just drink coffee and cry into their berets.
So, what point am I trying to make here?
My friend Mike Kabongo, who for his sins is a literary agent, did a post on this subject. I suspect – though he doesn’t say it – he did a post on this subject, because editors want to publish “significant” books and so he has to sell them to publishers as such.
I don’t envy him his job. In the past I’ve had to sell books to agents (who refused to send them out otherwise) as mind-changing, different, paradigm exploding. For science fiction that’s even more interesting because you can’t say “it’s a space opera and the twist is really in the plot, where it’s revealed that…” For fifteen years no agents would send out my science fiction because “you don’t have any brilliant new scientific idea.”
Okay – deep breath – it’s not that we want to write forgettable books, but most of us don’t get books in a form that we know what the “message” is. I’d argue when books come in that form they tend to end up as screeds and very boring. Beyond that, Mike makes a cogent argument that very few books, ever, change a person’s mind, and that they’re more likely to do so when the person is very young.
Heck, even Heinlein didn’t change my mind on anything with one book. He had a profound influence on my beliefs over time, but each of his books I read just for fun. Yes, they had a central idea. Yes, sometimes I even saw it. But while reading I didn’t care, I just knew it was a rip-roaring adventure I enjoyed. In re-reading I might pick up on the other ideas. And I reread him a lot, because it was a rip roaring adventure I enjoyed. (And my favorite Heinleins don’t have a “breakthrough science idea.” I’m sure other people had done alien mind-controlling invaders and sentient computers before he did.)
The second and more important thing is what I call “publishers thinking they’re Universities.” I.e. they think they can claim critical respectability and significance for genre by claiming the high ground of “message.” But that’s not how it works. Oh, a few of our number will make it over the hill – Umberto Ecco, who not coincidentally, is a philology professor and a few others – but most of the time the moment someone gets to that summit they’re not considered genre. Genre can’t be made respectable, because if it’s respectable it ceases being genre.
So, what to do? I don’t know. It’s one of those cases where it seems to me the publishers want something completely different from what the public wants. And the public doesn’t like the slow-message-laden, “serious” works that get the most push (hence the fall in circulation across the board.)
What do you guys think? Do you want each book you read to “blow your mind”? And do you want it to be in a life altering sort of way or just “Oh, I liked that” and “I never thought of magical jelly fish before”?
*Crossposted at According To Hoyt*
Mad Genius Club 
14 responses to “The Books Of Our Lives (by Sarah Hoyt)”
While I love a good story, I do like something that is a bit different. That’s why I like books that push the genre. And they usually don’t come from major publishing houses.
When I go into our local specialist bookstore I ask, ‘What’s obscure and interesting?’
Um… Rowena, if you asked that in the US you’d get stuck with stuff so thick with adverbs and adjectives you couldn’t cut through it with a chainsaw. But I know what you mean. I don’t tend to have “bestseller tastes” which is sad, actually… maybe it says something about me.
Heavens no! I don’t want to write a book with a message or a deep meaning. I want to write a story that is enjoyable to read in a setting that interests me. That can involve shifters, or a crazy traveling person with distinct eccentricities, or even semi-sentient magical ravens (and let’s not forget aliens that struggle with the concept of “pants”). But no message allowed (unless the muse comes up with something that I just have to write and then slips some strange message in while I’m not looking).
Chris,
If you can spot the message or if — heavens — the writer stops to preach, you are in the presence of utter incompetence. Go find a better author to read. 😉 And I agree with you. My books are NOT devoid of message, I know, but the message tends to emerge from the story, cooked up by my subconscious, and sometimes I’m not aware of it till I’ve written it. THAT type of message at least can’t help making the reader THINK because it’s built into the story and not on purpose, but because it’s how the reader thinks. It’s part of the magic of reading that you can get into someone else’s head for a moment.
“Does the street light world reflect the alien illumination cast by an invasive culture?”
Probably not, but it may reflect the alien illumination cast by an inverse culture(A much more interesting idea to my mind).
Once again my dislexia
Hey, some of my BEST ideas come from dyslexia.
If I finish a book thinking “Oh, I liked that” in my opinion it hasn’t done it’s job. That book will be forgotton in a week.
I need something to grab me by the shirtfront and not let go(and not in the rush, rush, rush, action, action, action way that seems so prevelant today). Something that will leave me thinking or speaks to me in words deeper than those that just tell the story.
There is a reason why I keep a copy of 1984 on my shelf and that Terry Pratchett is one of my favourite authors(you must read the first couple of chapters of I Shall Wear Midnight if you haven’t already).
Of course a book that is all message isn’t doing it’s job either. Nothing irritates me more than being preached to. That is probably the hardest task for a writer: To place whatever message there is seemlessly within the greater story, a task made harder as the prospective audience learns to recognise the author’s craft.
Pratchett is probably my favorite living author, closely followed by F. Paul Wilson, and I know what you mean — but a book that raises questions and makes you think, in a way that procedes naturally from the story itself, which in turn comes whole from the author’s pov (and often subconscious, at least in Pratchett’s case) is NOT the same as “I’m going to set out to write a book that will rock the world.” People who think or say that, usually do neither — write, or rock the world. (And I pre-ordered ISWM and the day it arrived was one of my rare semi-annual holidays. They’re called “Holy Pratchett book day. I read the book, THEN I resume work.”
I think you give me way to much credit for popularity. I doubt the publishers pay any attention to my existence except when they have to mail me a check or contract.
Not sure about that, Mike.
I’m interested in the character journey – I like adventure, action and the heroic journey. New ideas are great, but even a well-known setting is fine if it’s well drawn. I like good prose.
A few insights into human nature are good, but characters endlessly labouring some theme gets pretty dreary.
Chris,
YES! I used to think I was doing something wrong because I wasn’t “making sure every chapter advances your message.” (Yes, I read that in an how to book. How did you know?) but my mind — reading or writing — just DOESN’T work that way.
I read for the story and characters first. And I’ll read (almost) anything. Including printed jokes on loo paper. And the phone book, when I get really desperate.
The authors I admire most are the ones where I find more each time I reread their books. First read gets the surface story and characters. Second one, I start to see the layering. By the third or fourth reread, I’m getting depths I never realized were there.
Which is why Pratchett is on the “buy in hardcover, sight unseen” list. That list is very short (there are a few authors other than PTerry on it). Every author on it has changed the way I look at the world, but not because of anything overt – it’s always been the things that are hidden and burrow down into the subconscious to germinate properly.
I’m quite certain none of the authors have done it deliberately – and that they didn’t intend to put all that stuff there. They just wrote the book to the best of their ability, and in doing so hit something rather more potent than the many lesser authors who haven’t been able to tap that vein.
Kate,
That’s how I read too. The interesting thing, though is that I KNOW PTerry didn’t put in things on purpose. His process is actually SCARILLY like mine. I’ve heard him talk.