I’ve seen the growth of specifically writing-oriented university courses and qualifications (e.g. a Bachelor or Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing or Creative Writing, offered by a number of institutions).  I can’t help but think that these courses and degrees are putting the cart before the horse.  They may be able to teach you to write, or write better – but they can’t give you a broad-based foundation on which to ground your writing, and on which to build.  They can give you training, but not education… and there’s a BIG difference between the two.  (If you doubt that, ask yourself:  would you prefer your pre-pubescent daughter to attend sex EDUCATION or sex TRAINING classes in school?  I think that illustrates the difference right away!)

I was inspired to think about this by an article titled ‘Majoring in History to Become a Writer‘.  Here are a couple of salient paragraphs.

If you want to write you’re going to need experience writing and a history degree, even at the undergraduate level, is nothing if not rigorous when it comes to writing. My freshman western civ class required a fifteen page paper on the Roman Civil War. Frankly, I didn’t do that much writing again until grad school where we were expected to produce twenty to thirty page papers every semester. The heart of history is writing, and writing in a clear style.

. . .

Second, you’ll learn to do research. That’s important because as a writer of fiction you’ll have to acquaint yourself with things you’re not necessarily knowledgeable about. In fact here at Uprising we often talk about research and how you can write what you know, by learning what you don’t know then writing about it. You can educate yourself on other cultures, places, geography and so forth. Whether you want to write historical fiction, genre fiction such as sci-fi, or steamy romance, you’ll have to learn about things you’re not really familiar with.

There’s much more at the link.  Recommended reading.

I understand the author’s reasoning;  but I don’t think he goes far enough in his analysis.  I was raised in the British academic tradition, if I may use that phrase, by parents who each obtained a Doctorate in their respective fields (my father in Economics, my mother in Sociology) in the 1950’s.  Each went on to command respect in their fields in South Africa, where they’d settled.  However, for both of them, their post-graduate ‘specialist’ degrees were built upon a ‘generalist’ Bachelor of Arts degree.  They regarded the latter as ‘education’, and the former as ‘training’ after becoming ‘educated’.  Their professors (in the immediately post-World-War-II generation) taught that approach, and recommended it.

My parents, in turn, influenced me.  I began by tackling a generalist BA degree as well.  Given the ongoing external wars and internal civil unrest in South Africa, it took me ten years of part-time study to complete it, but I managed it in the end.  I did a dual major in English and History, with sub-majors in Economic History and Philosophy.  I followed that with a post-graduate diploma in Management, plus a Masters degree in the same field;  then the good Lord decided to change my career path, and I started all over again by studying Theology to become a pastor.  I ended up with four university degrees, and a very broad spectrum of courses.

That turned out to be a blessing for my writing career, along with some very varied and extensive life experiences.  I had enough background to be able to tackle almost anything that came up;  and, more importantly, I knew how to research areas about which I understood nothing at all, because I’d had to do so many times before in my secular education and career.  I don’t think I could possibly have learned as much, or experienced as much, by tackling a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts.

Another very important aspect of my education was that it was all part-time.  I never had the funds to be able to afford full-time study.  All my degrees were obtained by correspondence, studying in the evening after working during the day.  It meant that my progress was slower than it might have been… but there were no academic ivory towers involved.  I was rooted in and grounded upon the reality of earning a living, staying alive in a sometimes very heated combat zone, and not getting airy-fairy, artsy-fartsy, idealistic ideas about how the world should be.  I was too busy ducking and running from what it was!

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I think that educational background has served me far better, as a writer, than the more specialized, limited education offered by today’s universities in the field of creative writing.  I daresay many of the authors who contribute here would say the same.  To cite just one example, Dave Freer is very highly qualified in ichthyology, an intensely practical science, and has also experienced military service, farming, emigrating to another continent, and what have you.  I’m sure his writing would not be nearly so interesting without all he’s learned from those different backgrounds.

What say you, dear reader?  How have your life experiences and education affected your writing?  Have they helped, or hindered it?  Please let us know in Comments, with as many details as seem appropriate.

I’ve been so swamped finishing my fantasy novel that it completely slipped my mind that I had to post an article this morning.

I’m working on it, and I’ll put one up in an hour or so.  Meanwhile, to whet your appetite, here’s the magnificent cover Cedar Sanderson designed for my new book.

 

 

It’ll be published in ten days or so.  I hope you enjoy it!

Peter

 

But teh meenz people sai ai haz to rites. Is no fare. Ai wants to play wif teh cyoot kittehs. K?

Thx, bai!

(sounds of a scuffle and something being dragged back)

Bugger. Sorry.

It’s been a hectic few days. The day job includes the software development team being second or third tier support (depending on how little anyone in the actual support group wants to deal with things). Up until recently, it was handled by people other than me.

Then one of the three people in the hot seat resigned (lucky sod), and me being the most experienced of the remaining non-support-team dev people, I agreed to take it on. Unfortunately, this more or less coincided with the other two dev support folks being on vacation. So this week I’ve been it.

The issues with clueless users… well, okay. This is kind of the norm, after all, although I’m not sure how many times you have to tell someone to do something before they actually decide to do it. The flapping support team members… I wouldn’t mind so much except that they have a tendency to interrupt when I’m trying to focus, which makes it harder to get anything done.

Trying to figure why in hell anyone would think it was a good idea to store email recipients in the freaking Windows registry, on the other hand… Yes, it’s a service. Yes, it’s going to have to send error emails now and then. What is wrong with having the recipient email address/es in a bloody config file?

This, ladies, gentlemen, and beings of indeterminate sexual characteristics, is why I am completely pants at writing stupid. I can understand a lot of things. Evil. No problem. Saintly takes a bit of work to get into the mind space but I can do it. But dumb? That just makes my head hurt and causes random outbreaks of LOLSpeak.

 

So, in continuing our discussion of genre structure we’ve hit mystery, which is almost as much of a problem as science fiction/fantasy.

I’m not sure why these two genres have moved off so far into different structures, except that for a long time they were very popular and everyone read them. But then why hasn’t romance done that?  And it hasn’t.  Other than certain touch points like one will have explicit blow by blow (eh) sex and the other not the structure of all romances is fairly similar.  (You need a little more scene setting in historical, but that’s about it.)

I don’t know.  All I know is that everything from thrillers to cozies gets shoved under mystery, so we’re going to spend a while going over each of the subgenres.  We’ll have to do the same for sf/f, so bear with me.

So, in this post I’m going to identify various subgenres (and will probably miss some) by their central, most obvious characteristic, then leave the detailed structure to do one by one or two by two in future posts.  I’ll inevitably forget one or two subgenres, so please, people, remind me.

Thriller –

There is a big menace on the loose.  This can be a country or a person.  Someone is seriously endangered by this.  It’s kind of like tracking the hunt from the pov of the deer and hoping the deer wins.

It has sub genres:

Women in Peril, often a romance subgenre.  The woman is the one in peril.  She might or might not be involved with the detective trying to save her.  It might also be a woman detective who has a past of a similar death in her family.  These often end badly, but not when they’re part of romance, obviously.

International espionage – I don’t need to explain this, right?

It can overlap with scientific thriller or police procedural.

This is the structure most often ported outside the genre, like to science fiction, particularly hard science fiction.

Police Procedural

Your main characters are police, and it aims to be “realistic”.  It’s of course not realistic, because reality includes a lot of boring things.  The police are USUALLY the good guys.  Crimes get solved.  Mood is often brutal or dingy.

it has subgenres. They’re not VERY distinct, unlike Thriller’s.

Female police detective – often comes with a lot of psychological thriller elements, in that the vulnerability of the female officer translates to elements of WIP.

Noir – Often historical.

Almost cozy – while the police procedural is there, it backs off that and into the psychological makeup of the police officer.

Technical – think CSI.  this is where we become obsessed about pain transfer and particles in a living room.

Cozy

The characters and their relationships are more important than the crime.  Or at least that’s how you solve the crime.  Derided by … won’t say idiots… for not being realistic (look, bub, it’s fiction) it’s the most popular type of mystery.  Attempts to eliminate it result in its splitting off into things like craft mysteries.

It has subgenres.  Oh, boy, does it ever:

Romance- First and foremost, it’s often found as a subplot in romance.  It also usually HAS a romance subplot.  Agatha Christie the grandmama of the genre had detectives who tried to  help couples.

Woman in Peril and ALMOST romance – Any of Patricia Wentworth’s books.  The emphasis is more on the mystery/peril than the romance, but it’s a dang close call.

Craft mystery – this is what happened when they tried to stop publishing cozies for being unrealistic (!)  It just became craft mysteries because the “craft knowledge allows the amateur to solve the murder.”  Yeah.  And I have some beach front property in florida.

Profession mystery – Carolyn Hart and her booksellers mysteries is an example, but there’s mysteries with hotels, restaurants and various stores.  I know there were programmer mysteries, at one type, wonder if there still are.

Location mystery – Can’t go on vacation? Want to live with the rich and famous?  Well, there’s Caribbean mysteries, and various college mysteries, and Hollywood mysteries.

Under this perhaps we should slip Historical Mysteries.  They’re a location and a time, and they have a structure of their own.  There is also some wisdom in picking location and time.

Buddy mysteries – dynamic duos can feature in any kind of mystery, but there is a particular kind of cozy people will tell you aren’t cozies, like say Nero Wolf Mysteries.  I mean, the characters are MEN and one even gets in fights.  But if you look at the structure they’re cozies.  This dynamic duo thing even has a structure of its own, both re: the relationship of the two characters, and their roles.  They don’t need to be same sex or buddies.  Agatha Christie used it for Tommy and Tuppence, a married couple.  And I arguably used it for the Musketeer Mysteries, an historical.  All the same, because of the variation of structure called for, it should be covered on its own.

Psychological mysteries – often focus more on the crime than the solution and creates a “certainty” with its psychological “tech” than is normally warranted by a soft science.  I was nonetheless addicted to these as a kid.  Like the Police Procedural, the hard part is seeming “realistic.”

YA Mysteries – can be any of the other types, but the protagonists are children, the crime is rarely a murder, and there’s a certain structure to them.

Mystery short stories – These are a completely different genre, in that just being about a crime is enough.  There need not be a solution.  In such they often become “crime and punishment” (or lack thereof) morality ( or lack thereof) plays.

Mystery adjacent – True crime.  Stories based on true crimes, often owe more to psychological mysteries than acknowledged.

 

 

 

You’re lucky I am posting at all tonight, as I have at the moment it seems insufficient blood for my brain for much thinking. Most of it seems to be hovering around my Gastro-intestinal tract. We have a nasty batch of Gastric ‘flu that has swept the island (and Melbourne for that matter. It was in the papers a few days ago, illustrating the subtle difference between Oz and the US.) As I’m a Volunteer Ambulance Officer, and my wife works in the Doctor’s surgery (and yes, it hasn’t skipped him, either) it’s one of life’s inevitable issues. Only people with toddlers in pre-school are more in the target zone.

Now, as my main thought tonight is “how far am I from the porcelain throne, and have I brought a big enough bowl along?” I thought I’d write about something derived from that, seeing as my American cousins blanch at the idea of describing gastro – but will cheerfully write the most detailed description of oral sex. British humor is more scatological than American. For British colonial, multiply that by two. It can cause some confusion. I remember some American visitor of youth asking for ‘the bathroom’ – and being conducted to it. There was no flushing convenience in there…

And yet… if we’re talking fantasy-worlds with horses and knights and whatever… well, let’s put this way: the bloody flux killed more people than any battle ever did. And every time I read fantasy about people drinking water – or filling water bottles in villages and towns – I go ‘Oh shit!’ for good reason. I often wonder if some of the more insane deeds of yesteryear owe their doing to the fact that the street was the sewer and washed down into the river, from whence came all the water. You drank alcohol not just because it made you see toothless women through beer-glasses (quite common before oral hygene – the fan flirted behind was in no small part to hide the state of the teeth in high society that could afford sweet things but knew little of oral hygiene. Even I blench talking of the dentistry of ‘the good old days’.) Alcohol was literally safer to drink than water. Small-beer or watered wine – or just a mug of porter or goblet of Gascony got you going in the morning. It was that or water, which could really get you going.

I often wonder if the popularity of tea might have something to do with the boiled water involved.

Anyway, I wasn’t actually going to post about the potty-details. I was simply using them to make a point, and not just about the traps and pit-falls of different cultures within the Anglosphere.

That point is that realism in fiction – often praised… is actually seldom sought.

Here’s the thing. Reality is FULL of TMI. And a lot of it, if it isn’t revolting, is BORING. Kind of like the twitter account that details every single thing, reality actually comes largely as something skipped for the exciting bits. Now, SOMETIMES readers actually want realism in these exciting bits. But they want the good realism or the bad realism and not the actual thing. Trust me on this. There really are limits. There are ‘exciting’ bits of my life as a Medic you really don’t want to go through, even vicariously. And there are far worse things.

What you’re trying to do is a very difficult balancing act no one ever tells you about or explains. You’re trying to distil time and distance, and the reality of the human condition into ‘the interesting bits – but not the wrong bits of that.’ And what is the wrong bit? Well I’m stuffed if I can tell you. I just know it when I see it – by the fact I’d rather not. Graphic sex that literally reads like an IKEA instruction schedule comes to mind. When you actually sit down and STUDY books praised for their realism, you’ll pick up a constant pattern – no matter how different the books – of the authors tricking the reader into believing they’re giving a detailed and often graphic description of a real event. Often with what would be termed ‘gritty’ details, bordering on the TMI line.

If they’re good it is crafted into a seamless package, that feels ‘real’ (even if you have never experienced that reality). The key is in having enough very precise but often discrete details – some at least of which the reader will recognize and identify with – so they believe and accept AND FILL IN THE BLANKS. Really. It’s not damn IKEA instructions. The writer pictured – and smelled and felt and feared/loved it in his head – and gave you details so you can produce your picture (which may well not be his picture).

Take your favorite piece of realism. Read it sentence for sentence, from the end to the beginning. Learn how to do this. It’s largely something writers to instinctively, but understanding it doesn’t make you worse at it. It makes you better.

And now…

I need to go and see a man about a dog.

Urgently.

(And yes. I just illustrated my point, without even mentioning technicolor yawns.)