No, Jake. Clean enough ain’t good enough. You should know that.
I owe everybody email. Sorry. I’ll get to it soon, honest.
In the mean time, Jeff Vandermeer has a a very nice rant — buttressed by his Best American Fantasy reading experience — about the state of short fiction, one that dovetails with a lot of my own irritations. It’s called “The Triumph of Competence” and it’s worth a read.
As I thought about this further, I visualized a story mill, similar to a puppy mill. An endless churning sound as thousands of writers typed and handwrote the first drafts of stories destined from conception to be good enough. Good enough for publication. Good enough to pass muster. Good enough to earn an appreciative nod. It was a depressing thought.
I kept coming back to words like rough and wild and pushing and punk and visionary. Words for what I was reading were more like twee, comfortable, recycled, reasonable, well-rounded, whimsical, unoriginal, well-behaved, and fuzzy.
Sometimes I worry that, while we’re congratulating ourselves on moving beyond nostalgia for a simpler time of barbarian swordsmen, drawing-room occult investigators, and Heinleinian Competent Men, we’ve just fallen victim to a new nostalgia for the golden age a generation or two later of ethical vampires, elves on motorcycles, and fairy-tale retellings with Thomas Canty covers.
I keep hoping we’ll hit Peak Retro, but no luck so far.
(Don’t worry; of course I’m not talking about you.)
Anyway: Not writing crap is a good start. But Point This Doesn’t Have Anything Wrong With It isn’t a good place to stop.
October 17th, 2007 at 3:25 pm
To be honest, at this point I’d rather read crap. Crap has honesty. Good Enough is dishonest to its core.
October 17th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
while we’re congratulating ourselves on moving beyond nostalgia for a simpler time of barbarian swordsmen, drawing-room occult investigators, and Heinleinian Competent Men,
Have we really moved on beyond that kind of nostalgia? Aren’t all of those tropes still in use?
October 17th, 2007 at 5:29 pm
Well said, Meghan.
Ted, when I say “we,” I don’t really mean the whole genre — though I do think there’s something of a generational shift.
October 17th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
Okay, I really know I’m getting old when the kids are getting old. ‘Cause remembering the golden age and thinking they did it so much better back when? You’re just getting old. Sorry to break it to you.
October 17th, 2007 at 5:59 pm
Yeah, I know. Those of us in or beyond our mid-30s probably got started too late to ever be cool.
It’s not too late for Meghan, though!
October 17th, 2007 at 6:01 pm
Agreed, but isn’t Jeff’s rant more or less the same as Kelly’s of a year or two ago? Her plea for people to push their work beyond comfortable and competent to something INTERESTING.
October 17th, 2007 at 6:11 pm
More or less. I’d say and rather than but.
October 17th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
That works. I just meant, I feel like we’ve had this conversation. Or maybe it’s just that we still are, I guess.
Sometimes I use the (rather melodramatic) phrase “blood on the page” for this kind of stuff. As in, there isn’t any. As if stories were something to be made from some raw material that does not include the author, if that makes any sense.
October 17th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
Just came across this quote, so I’m back: “”The good is the greatest rival of the best.” —Nellie L. McClung
And, trust me, it’s never too late to be cool. Cool just gets weirder as you get older.
October 17th, 2007 at 11:11 pm
There was this one comment there that said:
What’s especially frustrating to me is that some of these writers I talk about basically take a slice-of-life narrative about their parent’s divorce or something and then try to redeem it by tacking on some kind of twee zen koan of an ending, like that’s supposed to infuse what’s basically a tedious and self-indulgent journal entry with a kind of symbolic magic.
– which I read & went, Oh my God! Oh my God! etc. because that describes pretty much everything I write ever[1] (and also touches on the scary-to-me question of why I feel so convinced that everything I write is fantasy and that I can only write fantasy, even though I’ve pretty well stopped reading it.)
(I must say that I find any and all applications of the word or the notion of “punk” to SF to be vaguely embarrassing, even though Vandermeer is right about everything else.)
[1] i.e. some girl does something confusing and depressing. Suddenly, magic! Outside, the snow keeps falling. Later, the sun goes down.
October 18th, 2007 at 8:03 am
Zoe, the story you sold me and Susan wasn’t like that, so I still have hope.
Also, just because something’s been done a lot and people are bitching about it doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t do it — so long as you’re convinced you can do it better. Just make sure your symbolic-magic-infused journal entry isn’t tedious and self-indulgent, and you’re golden.
“Fantasy” is a pretty big tent, big enough that its inhabitants can shove up and make room for just about anybody. But there’s also a lot of stuff outside the tent that wouldn’t look out of place under it — Aimee Bender, Robert Girardi, George Saunders. I wouldn’t worry too much about what what you’re writing is, so long as you’re writing it.
October 18th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
>Agreed, but isn’t Jeff’s rant more or less the same as Kelly’s of a year or two ago? Her plea for people to push their work beyond comfortable and competent to something INTERESTING.
I guess my problem is, at this point I’m starting to feel a little insulted by these rants. I mean, I completely and totally understand the reasons for them, and as a reader I basically disagree.
But dude. We are _trying._ I am willing to be that the overwhelming majority of writers are _trying._
Criticize my work, sure. I do, too. But don’t pretend you know my goals or intentions. Is it really that much easier to believe that people are deliberately slacking than it is to believe that they’re just not good enough (yet, or at all)?
October 18th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
After meeting some people in workshops whose professed ambition was to get a story published, full stop… I’m not sure “deliberately slacking” is quite right, but it’s not far off.
Also, it’s probably my fault for framing it this way in the first place, but I don’t think good/bad is the right axis. Ambitious/unambitious maybe? “I want to write a story at least as good as the worst story I’ve seen in F&SF, and then sell it to F&SF,” isn’t a great recipe for getting a story in F&SF, let alone advancing (or slowing the decline of) the field.
October 18th, 2007 at 3:46 pm
Hannah: I can’t speak for anyone’s motivations, although I have met too many people who wanted to create “sellable” fiction. I think one thing that’s being misconstrued is that I’m somehow sitting in some high tower looking down at all the other poor fools. Er, no. I’m one of them poor fools struggling with my fiction, the idea of what I want to do with my fiction, being as vaguely dissatisfied with what I’m doing as anything else. In a sense, it’s a kick in the pants to me first and foremost.
JeffV
October 18th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
Ditto that. I fear becoming interchangeable.
October 18th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
>I’m somehow sitting in some high tower looking down at all the other poor fools. Er, no. I’m one of them poor fools struggling with my fiction, the idea of what I want to do with my fiction, being as vaguely dissatisfied with what I’m doing as anything else.
No, that’s understood.
(And rereading my comment, I realize that I said “…as a reader I basically disagree…” when I meant to say “…basically agree…” Stupid typing fingers.)
October 18th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
I wondered what kind of bad day you’d been having.