Storytellersunplugged

These words (or at least some of them) are being written somewhere over Oklahoma. 35000 feet or so over Oklahoma, to be precise, but at a certain point, there’s no real point to being picky.

This piece was supposed to be written a week ago. Or possibly two weeks. Maybe a month, if you want to give me credit for planning ahead. Planning, however, is not the same as executing, and when it came time for execution, something else jumped the queue for the guillotine. Work has been throwing razor-edged deadlines at me, which is part of the reason I was over Oklahoma when the piece was started, en route to Santa Monica and another voice recording session. Wind backwards from that, and you find tight deadlines, lots of game writing, and precious little time for ruminating on writing because those words were needed elsewhere.

Now, though, I’m at the end. The last lines of dialogue on that particular project have been laid down, buffed, and polished to a shiny hue that the actors will hopefully be able to do something with. The month-long sprint to deadline is finished, or at least done for the moment, and I find myself winding down. Imagine if you will, there’s such a thing as creative adrenaline, and angry deadlines provide the intellectual equivalent of a fight-or-flight reaction. For my part, at least, I generally get “fight,” which is to say I regard the deadline as a personal challenge if not an insult, and I will fling myself at deliverables with reckless and vicious abandon until they lay in smoking ruins before me. This sort of thing tends to play hob with, among other things, sleeping habits, social plans, and any writing that I try to do outside of work, but the work gets done, hammered through like whatever unfortunate piece of granite happened to be directly in front of John Henry at the exact wrong moment.

It ends, though. It always ends, sometimes at the deadline, more often a bit later when the people I’m working with have finished their tweaking and allowed me to catch up once and for all with what they’ve done. That’s when the creative adrenalin drains, when the sprint stops, when the part of the brain attached to the fingers says, “hang on a minute, I need a nap here”. It’s time for catching my breath and prepping for the next run, whether it’s on my stuff or someone else’s. Because there will be a next run, there always is.

But in the meantime, I get to think about the fun stuff and do the pondering that keeps that brain-fingers connection reasonably limber and nimble.

Let us consider, for a moment, the last time I dared dabble in matters of definition. The postulate then was that literary fiction was concerned primarily with internal action and the resolution of the character into a fully functional whole, while genre fiction was concerned with functional individuals performing acts of resolution on the external world. Or, to put it another way, the literary fiction protagonist asks “Why am I so screwed up?” while the genre fiction protagonist asks “Was it really a good idea to send the short dudes into Mordor without a laser gun?”

This, needless to say, is an oversimplification, not that it was ever intended to be more than that. Genre definition itself is a slippery thing, particularly when wizards of speculative fiction have crossed the border into the world of the Times Book Review section, cunningly disguised by five-star reviews from Publishers’ Weekly and warm fuzzies handed down from the Rapunzels of the ivory tower.

Speculative fiction characters do of course experience internal growth and resolution. The point I was trying to make in the prior essay – no, not the one about why it’s a good idea to mow your lawn occasionally – is that in genre fiction, the character is expected to act in order to resolve the main conflict of the narrative. Whether the protagonist grows, matures, and changes along the way is in some sense irrelevant to the stuff that goes on the back cover of the book. He’s got to do something, and one can potentially do well without being well, as it were. Do it right, and you get the Continental Op, a resolute cipher of a man who nevertheless illuminates a great deal by means of the way in which he moves through the world. On the other hand, that does not automatically grant a free pass to have action-oriented characters be static lumps of granite, which is another way of saying “do it wrong and you end up with Perry Rhodan”.

That being said, it establishes by implication that the genre fiction can in fact have a rich, fulfilling inner life and growth. The difference being, I think, that in genre fiction, the interior resolution of the character is inextricably tied up with, and in many cases either essential to or derived from, the external resolution. Consider, for example, the character of Corwin in Roger Zelazny’s Amber novels. He starts out a tabula rasa, and, through action, recovers his inner life. Without the action, there’s no recovery – he just sits in the asylum. And while his self-recognizance is crucial to the development of the narrative, it is triggered and expressed through doing.

(Yes, I know that your favorite book isn’t like this. I concede the point, and simply suggest that a few others are, or might be, or could be if you read them at a sufficiently late hour after sufficiently large glasses of vodka. And that’s not the same thing at all, now, is it?)

And that leads to another point of difference: the stakes. Initially, I thought this was about scope. One can make the rough assessment that literary fiction is about one character, or maybe one family, while genre fiction is about the Dark Lord of Snoggleheim trying to cast the entire world under a ten-thousand year reign of unpleasantness. But that’s not it, not really – it’s about what is at stake, and why it is at stake. Write a book about one guy coming to grips with his inner life and you have literary fiction. Write a book about one guy coming to grips with the fact that someone’s been deprived of their biological life, and you’ve moved into genre territory, with a more quantifiable cost hanging in the balance. The fate of Middle-Earth or Amber or the last humans in the universe or the shuddery shoggoth jamboree – these are all big things, important things, things where there’s obvious and visible change in a direction that’s exciting to see. Read that book and you feel like you’ve been someplace, done something, really taken a step out of your world.

Or, to put it another way, this is why Assistant Pig-Keepers get promoted to king in genre fiction and would most likely come to terms with their essential pig-keeper-ness in literary fiction. One’s not better than the other, but it sure as hell provides a different ride.

For my part, I still prefer the wilder journey, though that doesn’t give the writer carte blanche to abandon all in pursuit of the action. A protagonist who changes and grows with the external situation provides a deeper and more interesting read, in my opinion, than most of the ones who just trundle along spouting catchphrase and attitude. To put it another way, when the external action is pursued as a proper outcome of the character’s internal landscape, then we might have something special. I think this is the next step in narrative development in genre fiction, one that many folks are already taking. I also think that it’s one that my current field needs to understand is important, or we’ll never get past “Aliens are attacking us!” “Why?” “Because they’re aliens!” and really take advantage of everything that video games can do. Until then, though, there are deadlines.

And hope.