On Genres, Truths, and Tropes (part three)

In his novel The Serialist, David Gordon writes:

“In its tropes and types, genre fiction is close to myth, or to what the myths and classics once were.  Just as, a century ort two ago, one could refer to Ulysses or Jason and hit a deep vein of common understanding in your reader, now we touch that place when we think of a lone figure riding in the desert, or a stranger in a long coat and hat coming down a corridor with a gun, or a bat wheeling above the city at night.  Reduced to their essence, boiled down, the turns and returns of genre unfold like dreams, like the dreams that we all share and trade with one another and that, clumsy and unrealistic as they are, point us towards the truth.”

I think that’s an over-glorification of genre fiction (and to be fair, the passage is the novel’s narrator, a mediocre pulp writer one step away from failure, justifying his hack work) but it does touch on a few baseline truths.

Genre fiction reflects what audiences believe to be true -- or perhaps more accurately, what they wish were true.  It’s fiction written catering to those beliefs, and while that doesn’t automatically preclude work in that genre from being worthwhile and valid, it sure doesn’t help.

Which is why I intend to steer clear of it in the future.

Mind you, this is no slam against those who delight in writing or reading genre fiction. 

I know many of them to be honest practitioners of their craft, bringing their best effort to the page, and trying their utmost to leave readers with something both entertaining and to some degree uplifting.

I enjoy genre fiction and I will doubtlessly be writing a lot of it in my future fictoids, but those by and large are merely light extemporanea.

A single potato chip, as it were; a tasty delight, crunchy and perhaps a bit salty, but junk food nonetheless.

Healthy meals of substance will be my long form stories, novels I intend to self-publish.  I don’t see much of a future for professional short story writing (i.e., getting paid for it) and will leave what little remains of that market to newer writers seeking to establish a foothold for themselves.

I’m tired of chasing after bones tossed by others, jumping through their hoops.  Yeah, it would be wonderful to write a best selling novel that garners me a huge financial reward and a vast readership, but as Joel Hodgson said of his show, Mystery Science Theater 3000, “It doesn’t matter if everybody doesn’t get the joke so long as the right people get the joke.”

To cop a line (but without irony) from This Is Spinal Tap, I wouldn’t mind becoming more selective in my audiences.

I have three completed novel manuscripts in the hopper, two contemporary stories, one set in the immediate aftermath of WWII.

More on the way.

If science fiction reflects a world the writer wishes (or fears) to live in, then these three books share a kinship to that genre insofar as they reflect the world I want to inhabit.

There is nothing inherently fantastic about them, though various pop culture brands and genres get mentioned in passing.

There is practically no violence in them (one’s about football, so there’s some rough and tumble gridiron action, but no one ever faces serious harm in the other books).

They’re not about mcguffins, prizes to be won that are important only to the characters in the stories.

They tend to be about values, and what we put important, and how we weight those values against one another.

All that philosophy is buried under tons o’fun, however.  They’re raucous, rowdy works with a lot of silliness and satire blended in.

They are, in short, the kind of books I find myself wanting to read at this stage of my life.

Which is why the Chronicles of Q’a will never be completed…at least not by yrs trly.  At some point in the not too distant future I plan to publish a short story anthology and the next Q’a tale will be included in that, but that’s the end.

I’m looking for something more substantial to chew on for nourishment in my coming years.

© Buzz Dixon