About That What-Not-To-Do Fantasy Writing Meme, or The Art Of Losing Isn't Hard To Master

[dr_pretentious]

This post about cliches in fantasy novels (fated love, irresistible Celts, etc.) set off this flurry of writerly vows (e.g. no rhyming prophecies, no salvific elves).

Okay, cool. A vow is a kind of formal constraint, and few things force a writer to be truly creative as well as a formal constraint does. I'm a formalist by training and temperament, for all my Dionysian tendencies, and my religious practices are chock full of vows. Voluntary, open-ended vows are great occasions for finding out what you really want, what you really can't abide. Cheers and godspeed to everybody who took vows.

True, some of these cliches are truly awful, and I have a long list standard fantasy tropes that don't entertain me. I've even got a few I've sworn off, such as the Violet-Eyed Heroine.

But I look at some of these vows people are taking, and I think to myself, yes, that's a thing that could be done badly, I've seen it done badly, and it would be easy to do badly, but that doesn't mean it never works. A lot of the vows arising in response to Nicoll's post say far more about personal taste than they say about what constitutes good or bad writing.

And then my willful perversity kicks in. Whenever people tell me a thing can't be done or that I can't do it, my first visceral response is, Oh, yeah?! Watch me! I don't always follow through--probably I will not take up bungee-jumping anytime soon--but damn, these vows make me want to choose the oldest, most done to death cliches and make them dance. Just out of pure orneriness.

Here's the thing I learned about formalism in poetry: the constraint, whether old or new, is not there to constrain you. It's there to free you from your assumptions. It's there to force you to relinquish the easy phrasing and to come up with something that's surprising to you. I love Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night," but by playing it straight, Thomas missed the point of the villanelle as a form. I'm not fit to pluck the crumbs from under A.R. Ammons's table, but he misses the point of the sestina. The thing to do with a cyclical or repeating form is to force it to tell a linear narrative, because there's no brighter burst of energy than the one you release when you force a form to do exactly what it doesn't want to do.

That's why Fountains of Wayne had such an unstoppable pop hit in "Stacy's Mom."

Millions of people all over the world could not get enough of a song steeped in bubble-gum sound that was, in its eroticism, Just Plain Wrong. What makes "Stacy's Mom" a brilliant song is that it steals its cliches, rather than just roboting them out. What makes Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" the best villanelle in the history of poetry is that it forces a form that's all repetition to escalate in a subtle, merciless progression from lost keys to the loss of a universe that is the loss of love.

Bishop's right, of course, that the art of losing isn't hard to master. Start by losing your assumption that you know what the cliche is for, what its limits are, what you can or can't crash into it. Then go on losing farther, losing faster. Lose your fear of censure. There is nothing you can write that sucks so badly you can't fix it, if your revision process runs deep and ruthless enough. There is no trope so shopworn you can't salvage it, if that trope is the thing that makes you feel the top of your head has been opened up to let the cosmos in--though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Comments

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

I love your literary wilful peversity. It always ends well.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

A couple of years ago at Worlcon, I was talking to a major editor in my genre, and she pressed me to pitch my book to her. I made her ask me twice, because it's generally considered Very Bad Form to pitch to agents and editors at cons if they're not offering appointments for that sort of thing. Anyhow, the big book was all I had going at that point, so I gave her the spiel (epic fantasy w/democratizing revolution, etc.), and she said, just to see how I'd respond, "But lots of paying readers like the divine right of kings. The divine right of kings sells. Can you tell me what makes you so sure that fantasy readers would want to buy the kind of story you're telling." I didn't really have an answer at the time.

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

How about, "Because lots of fantasy readers are not utter morons and like to explore a variety of approaches to the genre."?

[annathepiper]

I noticed that meme going around, yeah, and have also been avoiding it. Partly out of the same Oh yeah?! Watch me sentiment you have here, and partly just because enh, it kind of smacks of elitism to me to say "I refuse to write about these eleven things because I'm Too Superior A Writer".

I'd rather just see somebody pledge to make sure their writing doesn't suck. ;)

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I don't know if it's elitism if you allow the meme to help you clarify your own aversion. No, I'm the one who's fallen into elitism, by--oops--declaring myself too superior for the meme.

Well, now we see again that I come by my lj handle honestly. There's a reason this blog isn't called Ask Dr. Humble.

[annathepiper]

*giggle!* Okay, yeah, point. And I certainly must admit that I do agree with some of the things I've seen folks post about wanting to avoid, things which I would have to put on such a list for myself.

It does make one think about one's writing, regardless, and that's a good thing.

[tracyandrook.livejournal.com]

(Fixing what sucks by gutting it, often ends up with awesome results, but only if you don't run out of time or money. I might make the rule for myself that I will only do it once per venture. Best to back off a while before picking up the knife or the eraser or whatever.)

Are there any other bits on fiction cliches, telling us if they really do sell, and why? I wonder, how do fantasy readers pick their buys? By the cover? "Fantasy"...That word again...

hmm. For a visual analogue of your cliche contra--meme, try _Little Boy_ http://www.asianart.com/exhibitions/littleboy/index.html
Anime, yuck, yuck, bleck, gag, hate it. Why do so many people like anime?? The catalog of the exhibition only begins to answer that, but at least they begin.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

There's a fair bit about anime that baffles me, but there are Japanese animated films that I think are so far outside the cliches of anime that it's tempting to call them something else--sort of the way mainstream litfic readers shy away from calling Atwood's science fiction by its right genre, because after all, she's Margaret Atwood. Hayao Miyazake's films are like pillars rising from the lake.

One of Miyazake's recurring images is of trees and forests rising up in shapes inescapably reminiscent of mushroom clouds, like he's trying to redeem that trauma with every bit of visual storytelling moxie he's got. Quite a bit of moxie, as it turns out. You might like Princess Mononoke. It's entirely unsentimental, and the ending makes me cry every time I see it. I think I'm up to six times now.

[jaime-sama.livejournal.com]

This is interesting timing. Steve and I recently had a blogosphere discussion of the specific set of cliches that make a character a Mary Sue.

http://jaimesama.blogspot.com/2006/07/boy-named-sue.html

Your point here is a bit different. But in general, identifying a cliche in someone's writing is just the beginning of criticism and not the end, as Steve correctly pointed out.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Thanks for pointing me to that. I do like the question of why Aragorn isn't a Mary Sue (or Gary Stu, as some people call male Mary Sues). Tolkien's actually got a whole bunch of characters who are at risk of Gary Stu-dom. I wonder whether Peter Jackson made a deliberate decision to deflect that Gary Stu risk from Aragorn by piling it so comically onto Legolas. It's hard to dismiss Aragorn as the trilogy's big wish-fulfillment fantasy, after you've seen Orlando Bloom take down the Oliphaunt.

Hey, Gary's middle name wouldn't happen to be Stuart, would it?

[jaime-sama.livejournal.com]

No, luckily, it's Craig. ;)

I think it's clearer to call characters of both genders Mary Sues, because there is a quite different (yet equally icky) masculine version.

Either gender can be the amazingly beautiful/loved by all/awesomely powerful/so so special Mary Sue character. Alfred is one, in the Judith Tarr trilogy I recently read.

But there is also the super-manly wish fulfillment characters: loved by women (though he may treat them like crap), feared by men (because of his anger issues). Comes in at least three varieties: Borderline Psycho, Smooth James Bond, and the Heinlein Special (middle aged, un-handsome, with a huge set of versatile skills, and strangely irresistable to stunning female redheads...at least he usually is pretty decent to the poor smitten girlz, unlike the other two varieties...)

you are so right about Movie Legolas. None of the characters in the books bothered me much though. I guess Tolkien did an unusually good job setting the tone - the LOTR books are about a major turning point in the world's history, and some of the greatest hero figures. It seems fine for them to be larger than life. Also, other characters don't gush about them unless it's REALLY earned.