Writing

Guilty Pleasure Writing


So I came across this post in the NYT by Gary Gutting  from June about relativity in choosing your reading pleasure. Gutting referenced this post in the New Yorker by Arthur Krystal which posits that, if long-lived (and a little lucky) any genre writer can become a literary lion. In the end, it seems that what separates the genre writer from being a literary author is the number and kind of flourishes we use in our work.

Are genre novels inherently inferior?

Gutting says:

…the standards we appeal to in support of comparative judgments within a genre (complexity, subtlety, depth, authenticity and so on) could just as well be used to judge one genre, overall, better than another.

Does Hammett’s Red Harvest have less complexity, subtlety, depth, authenticity than, say, Les Miserables? And how many of the giants of literature – like Dickens – started out as less than adored by book critics? And if rhetorical flourishes are to be the yardstick, then what of Steinbeck and Hemingway?

When I’m asked what I write, I generally see the look of interest fade quickly to dis-interest, if not distaste, when I reply ‘urban fantasy.” I could probably get a better reaction if I said, “mystery” (with vampires and ghosts), since mystery has become what I’d call a respectable genre. Or maybe I’d get a better reaction if I said, “urban fantasy like Harry Potter.” But Rowling’s work and mine are alike only in being under the same, very wide, umbrella, so to link them would be misleading.

Though Urban Fantasy has become a potential Promised Land of best seller-dom (HP, 50 Shades of Grey, Twilight), it’s more than fair to say that hasn’t made it quite respectable. Not as respectable as The Surrendered by Chang-Rae Lee (here’s the New Yorker Review), which is “A haunting and often heartbreaking epic whose characters explore the deep reverberations of love, devotion and war.” This was the 2011 Pulitzer Prize Fiction winner, but I had to look it up on the Pulitzer site because I’ve never heard of it, stuck as I am in my genre ghetto.

Can a book’s worth ever be known to anyone but its reader? And will it always be relative? Then how are some books considered “serious” and others not?

We all know that being judged good enough for the Pulitzer Prize is not the same as everlasting glory and riches. It matters what you wrote before and what you will write after. Rex Stout may end up being more remembered by readers than Chang-Rae Lee.

So why would Lee’s book have more cachet than Stout’s if mentioned at a cocktail party? And it probably would, although there would be more people enjoying the conversation if it were about Stout than about the latest Pulitzer Prize winner. That’s the weird thing to me. More people will probably have read Stout and enjoyed his books than have read a prize winner, but his books wouldn’t be considered “serious.”

Why is that?

UPDATE:

Here’s what HarperCollins is doing for Michael Chabon’s (“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay”) new book, “Telegraph Avenue” – morphing an indie bookstore into a record shop.

What’s the difference between Chabon’s work and Lee’s? Is it more ‘accessible’? Chabon’s work would still be considered more serious than Stout’s, right? Is that why he gets a quarter of a million marketing stunt budget?

Still pondering here…

Translating the Movie In My Head

As someone who sees her fiction work in terms of scenes, translating those scenes from visuals in my head to words on a page is probably the most difficult part of writing.

This morning, I awoke sluggishly as a scene played out in my brain. It was a familiar ‘surprise’ used in many thrillers: a dorknob turns, the door opens. A man seen only from mid section to the tips of his fingers enters. He has on a nondescript tan raincoat and black gloves. He walks forward a few feet and we become aware he is standing in a living room. He pauses. In the stillness we can hear the muffled laughter of children playing. The man turns to the right and begins to walk quietly up a staircase, his shoes making no noise on the carpeted steps. On the next floor, he moves quickly down the hallway, pauses in front of a door, turns the knob, and opens it. Inside the room, decorated for a young girl, are two children, playing on the floor. They look up wide-eyed at the intruder, who walks towards them. Suddenly, the expressions on the childrens’ faces turn from startlement to joy. “Daddy!” they exclaim, flinging themselves at the man.

I have described this scene the way it might be viewed in a film (although obviously, it’s not formatted as a screenplay). It took me less than a minute or two to ‘see’ this scene in my head, complete with suspenseful background music. It took me so much longer, lying there crafting the sentences, to come to where I felt I was just beginning to get a handle on how this scene would play out in a novel. In fact, I didn’t finish it. I worked it along until the point that I realized I was probably never going to use that scene because it was too cliched, and there was no point in polishing an apple that wouldn’t be eaten.

But it did make me think about how we translate images, picking just the right words in just the right order to get them to help our readers play out the scene in their own heads more or less the way we saw it first.

But why bother?

I have a friend whose writing is pretty much conversation. He’s minimalist when it comes to scene-setting, and I don’t think his story suffers for it. Anyone making a film from one of his works would have to supply most of the visual context. He ‘hears’ the conversation and he writes it down. I hear the conversation as part of a movie in my head. The characters are moving, gesturing, and I feel the need to capture that when I write the scene.

Like my friend, I believe that only what moves the story forward should be included, but for me that can include socio-political asides. I think the main difference between my friend’s work and mine is that he is telling a story as simply as he can. Hemingway would agree with this. I, on the other hand, am always world-building, and always on the lookout for ways to anchor the reader to my world. I don’t think one way is better than another, though my friend’s minimalist writing allows the story to move more quickly, which would probably make it more salable these days, where time has become even more of a commodity.

I’m unlikely to give up my style of writing, so I’ll continue to struggle with getting the scene on paper to match the one in my head, but I don’t mind. I know those worlds – they like me there.

Are you visual? Do you struggle with getting the scene down properly? Or do you favour the minimalist approach? Let me know.