Make sure the sliver stays froze

[ksmith]

All the links are here, or you can check out wyrdsmiths for further discussion. Do genre habits and constraints allow the writer to maintain a distance from their work? Is that distance desirable? Does that distance prevent emotional exploration in work?

Stolen from cristalia: "...that the way genre's constructed insulates us from the blade-stepping." (Note: cristalia disagrees that the genre's constructed this way. I pulled the partial quote because it seemed the most succinct definition of the essential argument.)

Speaking as a writer who has on more than one occasion broken down at her keyboard, I think it boils down to process, what comes first in one's approach to story construction. Character has and always will come first with me, and that means I need to nab the buildings blocks from somewhere. Midnight requisitions from the depths of experience. It doesn't always have to be fraught, but there does need to be some solidity there. The straw to make the brick.

So, we're boiling, mixing, building, stealing. I think there are reasons that these words are the ones I use.

I constantly mine my experiences and what I know of the experiences of others. I'm really pretty cold-blooded about it. Cold-blooded even if I cry. Even if it hurts, I keep going. I can flip it, if I wish. Use it to lie or obscure. I don't have to tell my truth, just the truth as it relates to the story. Which allows for some protective distance while still revealing something.

Yet the stories are genre because the stakes are huge, the emotions are high. They don't call it "space opera" because of the singing and the costumes. I subscribe to malkingrey's view of genre as Romance-with-a-capital-R, a place of larger than life characters and stakes and settings. I hope I haven't misinterpreted her views.

Closeness, but at the same time. distance. That damned Graham Greene quote again. Someday I will come down fully on one side of the argument or another, but my world is shades of grey. So the worlds I write are shades of grey. Blended with experience, not always mine. Some people who've known me might be upset if they knew. Or not.

Anything I wrote would be written the same way because it's how I work, so I don't even know if it's a point of discussion.

And I hope to hell that I haven't missed the point of all this.

UPDATE: I will add that once the channel is open, I lose control over what passes through. The scenes that wrenched the most were seldom the ones that I thought would do so.

The Stephen King (iirc) story about the surgeon stranded on the desert island, who removes pieces of himself and eats them while recording the process in clinical detail. THAT ONE.

Comments

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Because I'm self-centred like this and it's all! about! me! just want to log that I was arguing against that. There's an "I disagree that" before that quote. *g*

Don't think you've missed the point, no.

Glad you found your iPod. *g*

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Well, you see I only use parts.

Parts is parts.

;-P

I shall re-edit the quote.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Danke. *g* I'm having an all! about! me! night because it distracts me from my half-finished story.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I'm so relieved over having found my iPod that I am All Agreeableness. And I have a book to revise and I ain't doing that either.

If I need to tweak further, let me know.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Boo revisions. Down with work and stories!

Thank you for thinking it is succinct. *g*

[juliabk.livejournal.com]

I'm going to go way out on a limb and say there are probably many more people who read genre shallowly than writers who approach their stories shallowly. Note that I didn't say 'writers who *write* shallowly' simply because the gulf between intention and execution isn't, I don't believe, what you're discussing here.

I, too, have sat sobbing over my keyboard or laughing so hard I scared the cats. I've gotten up and turned on every light in my place before I could write another word and I've got one story that's languishing because finishing it is far too painful. There's a 'place' I have to 'go' to finish it and I'm having a very tough time getting there. Or rather I'm having a very tough time making myself go there. Now, the interesting part is that it's not a place I've ever been to. The hardest thing is trying to find a certain capacity for a particular horror because that's what I need to tap in order to finish this one story.

So, no, I don't think genre distances from our work. I think there's an expectation that the ray guns and space ships take the place of the human drama, but they're just part of the structure. The foundations are the same as every other type of story-telling out there.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I've encountered a number of readers who don't seem to want the same sort of emotional connection with a work that I prefer. They want Action, and they don't want anything to slow it down.

One reader's introspection is another reader's whining.

[thecurlyboy.livejournal.com]

I guess my basic thought is - cutting deep can provide an influx of that human drama and motivations, that believability and life, into an otherwise cardboard cutout of a character or situation. Now, if an author can create memorable, believable main characters without delving into themselves, great, good for them. I'm just not sure it's something every author can do.

The genre doesn't matter. Spaceships or dragons, powered armor or platemail, they don't insulate you from blade-stepping, they're simply the scenery around which you frame your bloodletting as you desire.

[juliabk.livejournal.com]

Which is why there are many different writers, writing many different books. :-)

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I think that the issue is one of control. Uncontrolled yorking onto the page isn't going to do anyone any good. Control as best one can. Sometimes stuff seeps in without you expecting it, and that just happens.

Then the stuff gets in that you don't recognize until five years after the fact. That's always fun.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I think that's getting lost in the discussion. Because there are many ways to construct a book, but we all have the things we start with. I start with character, or an image that builds into an episode that develops into a character. Other writers work in other ways, and that's just the way it is. One way isn't more valid than another. It's just that there's one subset that I greatly prefer to read.