Mythic Structure :: In a World Without Genre

Genre has its place.  Certainly most readers see a long walk between Tolkien's war of the ring and Tom Clancy's war of the submarine.  Anything thing we can do to help a customer who loves one or more of those find others like it is a good thing.

The other day I implied that genre differences were almost entirely marketing.  I don't want to leave the impression that I think marketing books is a bad thing.  Genre is in the strictest sense, mostly about marketing.  Guiding a customer from the front door of a bookstore (remember those?) to the section most likely to hold books they would be interested in is marketing.  In my view, it is marketing of a mostly innocuous and helpful kind but marketing nonetheless.

Discover new authors + buy new books = happy readers, authors, booksellers & publishers.

Certainly my frequent assertion that bookstores should have a fiction section and a non-fiction section, alphabetized by author from A-to-Z never met with much success in my bookstore days.

Nevertheless, the distinction between the stories I mentioned is largely a matter of setting and macguffins.  The edges of the genres are much fuzzier than most devotees like to think.

JRR Tolkien was writing a war novel blended with a quest to end the war.  Reams of paper has been spilled drawing parallels between the War of the Ring and WWII, the One Ring being the Manhattan Project, etcetera.  Professor Tolkien denied any correlation, but it doesn't matter whether there was or not.  I have an edition of War & Peace featuring a forward that does exactly the same thing with Tolstoy's tale of the Napoleanic wars.  It doesn't matter that Tolstoy would be as surprised and annoyed as Tolkien was by the connecting lines that were being drawn from their tale to world events, the meaning of a story is in the mind of the reader.

Take almost any hero of almost any novel or story that actually resonates with readers (reflected by its success) and you'll find more commonalities than differences.  Change the age or gender of the characters and in strictest terms, there's very little to distinguish Tom Clancy's character Jack Ryan from Ernest Hemingway's Robert Jordan or JRR Tolkien's Aragorn, JK Rowling's Harry Potter or even Charles Dickens's Daid Copperfield and Lois McMaster Bujold's diminutive space admiral Miles Vorkosigan.  Heroes carry a universal tie that transcends genre.  Add just about any great literary hero to that list and you're going to find that they follow essentially the same path, crafted to fit their specific circumstances.

It's possible to write a great book completely ignorant of the universal thematic elements you are employing. The very nature of universal themes is that they are encoded into our collective subconscious.  How much easier would it be to do, though, if you know what you're about?  (JK Rowling has a BA in Classics from Exeter, you bet your sweet bippy she knew exactly what she was doing when she wrote Harry Potter.)

Readers frequently deny this, but any author striving to create characters and explore themes that will stand the test of time won't get far denying it.  If you don't believe me, read Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces.  Or if you prefer, there's a superb re-treatment of Campbell's lessons aimed directly at writers called The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers by Christopher Vogler.  One or both books should be on your shelf (or in your e-reader if you're so inclined).

It's pleasant to think that it's also true in terms of storytelling, stretching much further back into the history of words exchanged around a campfire, an unbroken line from Gilgamesh to Odysseus to Frodo Baggins and beyond.  But how does all of this tie to genre?

I posit that the lines dividing genre are being slowly eroded by electronic bookselling.  Just as there are tags at the bottom of every post on this blog that you can use to explore by theme, so too are books in online bookstores drawn together by thematic tagging.  No longer are you confined to a bookstore shelf holding only the books in your chosen genre, books are linked across the spectrum irrespective of genre distinctions.  Harry Potter is likely to turn up as "You Might Also Like" in a search for David Copperfield because both feature orphan heroes.  In a bookstore an adroit bookseller might know to make that suggestion, but such booksellers are getting fewer and farther between.

If you are unaware of your structure and thematic elements in your writing, then in a world where the reader isn't standing in front of a shelf surrounded by only books by you and people who write just like you, then you're drawing random cards in hopes of getting a royal flush (or at least a straight).  Personally, I prefer to stack the deck any way I can.

It's not the first time I've said it nor the first time it has been said: Writing is an industry that has - more than any other - remained virtually untouched by the last 500+ years of technological advancement.  Usually I say that in relation to the shockwaves still rocking the industry as they try to adjust to the idea of text on a screen instead of ink on a page.  This too is a change that will take a long time to get used to and benefit best those who address it first and those who are aware of it earliest.  I am tempted to trumpet it as the ultimate triumph of the storytelling form, millennia of storytellers who spoke tales to the heart, not the marketplace -- the marketplace coming back around to meet the storyteller rather than the other way around... but that might be too much to say too soon.

Regardless of the ultimate outcome this much I know is true: In a world of bookstores without bookshelves, being ignorant of your thematic ties to other books in other genres is well nigh suicide.

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Edit: Repaired some wonky formatting (gosh, thanks Blogger) and retooled that final paragraph where I wandered a bit.  -Scott

Clear cutting the Genre Jungle

We think of science fiction as being a relatively new phenomenon.  Even if you include the works of Jules Verne, that still only makes the genre 148 years old[1].  However, I would argue (as do many others) that science fiction has been with us since the beginning of the spoken language.  When early humans stared up at the stars and postulated reasons that they were up there, who put them there and whether or when they might want them back, the first science fiction stories found their grip. 

Speculative fictions have been used since the dawn of time to entertain and enlighten, to help us to accept and process our fears and hopes as they were reflected by the unknown and the unknowable. 

When Jules Verne put us at the center of the earth, on the moon or 20,000 Leagues deep he was expressing the popular scientific ideas of our time, the potential of the industrial revolution, and the latent fears of his age -- that our technologies were maturing faster than our culture.  During the 1950's, science fiction achieved its golden age in that heady moment when the industrial revolution surged forward once more and our hopes and fears got tangled in a time of cold war paranoia.  In a time when our culture wasn't willing to look inward with clear eyes, some of America's finest writers showed us ourselves in the mirror of the sky.  Aliens and robots infiltrated our world as a stand-in for our fears of communists and flying saucers came to get us because our official narrative was that atomic power was our Great Hope even as school children were taught to duck and cover. 

As the Soviet war machine crumbled, we turned simultaneously to more hopeful messages of Utopian visions and turned to the likes of Gene Roddenberry's quietly subversive*[2] Star Trek even as our fears of ourselves cranked ever inward.  Star Trek's hopeful future was always at war with the apocalyptic and dystopian visions of the cyberpunks and with the dawning of the new century, our fear of ourselves gave rise to shambling hordes of zombies.  With the 21^st century dawning as a time when our greatest fears are infectious diseases, the onus of exploring our fears shifted ever more heavily onto the shoulders of the horror writers who once spent their ink on the spooky and  supernatural.

In some ways, this frees science fiction to return to celestial matters and even though the dystopian continues to infect the culture (see Firefly), we're slowly returning to the idea that our future lies in our hope of a better place elsewhere.  Even when we look back, our eyes have a gauze of the fantastic drawn over them embodied best by the advent of Steampunk.

Science fiction has long been uneasy bedfellow to that other monolith of the speculative, the fantasy novel.  The roots of this lie in the fact that what was science in an earlier time becomes the fantasy of the present.  And is further complicated by movies and novels of the Star Wars variety which use of science fiction as a setting rather than a mission, using it as a language and framework to explore our imaginative realms with little regard for how, or if, the things we’re talking about would actually work in any sort of scientific way.

Many authors and fans of the science factor bridle at this comingling of science fiction and fantasy in the bookstores and movieplexes.  As you might imagine, I personally think that there’s nothing wrong with using an existing framework to just have a little harmless fun.  Howard Carter Saves the Earth certainly swims in that end of the pool.  

I bring all of this up because I firmly believe that the genre distinctions that I’m describing are evaporating far more quickly than we can argue about where the borders lie.  Genre is and always has been largely a matter of marketing and it is an illusory map that we’ve drawn for ourselves to help our fans find our works in libraries and bookstores.  But in a world where the library and the bookstore are virtual, where it would be shelved is less meaningful than what it might be tagged in a database.

“Think of a tag as a keyword or category label. Tags can both help you find items on the Amazon site as well as provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify items for later recall.”
                                                             Source: Amazon.com

At Amazon, a book like Howard Carter might be tagged with any of the following: young adult, adventure, comedy, humor, science fiction, government conspiracies, time travel, mad scientists, robots, science fiction, giant robots and any one of a dozen or so more.  

Out of curiosity, I went and clicked on those tags and looked at what -- other than any other books I write -- Howard Carter will be “shelved” alongside at Amazon.  I was surprised to discover that Howard, who would live comfortably in either the YA or science fiction/fantasy sections of any bookstore or library, would share the monitor screen with the likes of  The Dangerous Book for Boys and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, both of which I sort of expected, but also Eat, Pray, Love (I kid you not), a boatload of adventure novels I’ve never heard of, and for better or worse, the Wedding Crashers DVD.

Now, I’m the first to admit that the latter half of that list is pretty silly.  I sincerely doubt anyone will ever say “I loved Eat, Pray, Love, let’s go read this book Howard Carter Saves the World.  Never mind the big robot on the cover; I’m sure they’ll be exactly alike.”  But it does illustrate how far the barriers have eroded. 

Readers of books much closer to Howard Carter might stumble across my funny little book from more likely crossover titles ranging from Hitchhiker’s Guide to Harry Potter and even places that wouldn’t normally be on the same floor in a brick & mortar store like Catcher in the Rye.  Not because I think I belong on the shelf next to Mr. Salinger, but because the database doesn’t really care what I or Mr. Salinger might think about it -- a book is a book and a coming-of-age story is a coming-of-age story.

Science Fiction has always been a way of exploring the hopes and fears that lie in the unknown.  In some ways Howard Carter is an expression of my own hopes and fears for what this future world without genre might hold.  In a time when everyone -- myself included -- are bemoaning the death of the physical bookstores, it’s worth it to pause and reflect on some of the other changes that are happening in the shadow of the battle between the real and the virtual.

Just as the clear cutting of any real jungle is not adviseable, I don't think it's necessarily a good thing to just wipe out the delicate ecosystems that have evolved in our bookstores and libraries just because we are transferring to a virtual economy.  But maybe that's just because the most basic concern of all humankind is shelter and at the moment the entire literary world is looking askance at the future and asking "Once this is gone, where shall we live?"

Or maybe it's just time for us to evolve.  Maybe it's time for the literary amphibians, a time for both readers and writers to make themselves at home in more than one environment.  Or is that just my Utopian ideals surfacing again?  Only the future knows for sure...

 

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[1] Verne wrote Paris in the 20th Century in 1863, though it wasn't actually published until the 1990's.  Journey to the Center of the Earth would be published a year later.

[2] Don't think of Star Trek as subversive?  The original Star Trek debuted in the disaffected years of the Viet Nam era, in the heart of the Johnson Administration, after the assassination of Kennedy and what was viewed by my father's generation as the fall of the dream of an American Camelot.  It took place in a future where money was meaningless and the striving of capitalist societies were viewed with distaste.  Which, considering the tone and tenor of the time, makes it pretty darned subversive.

Readers make the best writers

She asked: How did you learn to write?

The simple answer was "In school, just like everyone else" but the simple answer is seldom true even when it is factual. Yes, I learned to write in school. But the real question I think this student wanted to ask was "How did you learn to be a writer?"

And between writing and being a writer is a difference with a definite distinction.

I didn't say "In school", what I said was "By reading a lot of terrible books."

I don't think she believed me, but it's true.

I think all writers learn essentially the same way; not by diagramming sentences, but by reading them. Want to be a writer? Read vigorously and voluminously. Read everything you can get your hands on.

We learn to write by reading what others have written. We see what others did and imitating the ones we like and not the ones we hate. Slowly and by fits and starts we discover how to make dialogue sound like speech. And most importantly, we learn how to make decisions by making guesses about what will happen next and getting as excited by being wrong as we are when we're right. Because if we are wrong about the outcome of the story, that means we've come up with a new story, an alternative decision.

My dad called that daydreaming, but in reality it's the first steps of storytelling.

Sure, Scott, but you said "Reading lots of terrible books."

Bad books are in many ways more informative than the good ones. I learned plenty reading books I loved and cherished. My shelves are full of those books, but the ones I learned the most from are the ones I didn't buy or got rid of as quickly as possible. In many ways, I learned to write by reading books I hated and then making a point of not doing what those authors did.

Want to be a writer? Read. You want to try to recognize what the writer is doing, but before you do that, you have to read. Good books, bad books, fiction and non-fiction, blogs, newspapers, magazines, and comic books. In libraries and classrooms and secret reading nooks, under trees by the light of the sun and under the covers by the light of Mag. If it makes you want to throw it across the room in anger or frustration, fine.

But then go pick it up and try to figure out what it is that made you turn a book into a missile. Because that... that is a writer's homework in the only education we get. And a writer, as I always say, is someone who volunteered to keep doing homework everyday for the rest of our lives.

There aren't many rules to writing; don't let English teachers tell you different. But there's one that I abide by without fail: don't write them unless you read them.