Literariness

I write fantasy. I imagine that if I am ever published, my books will appear in the fantasy/science fiction section of the bookstore. Is that a bad thing? Is it something to be ashamed of? Is fantasy only childish, escapist make-believe? I think the answer to these questions is obvious - a resounding "No."

Genre does not determine the quality or merit of a book. It only describes certain conventions used in the storytelling and helps booksellers decide where to shelve particular books. It is a loose term with ill-defined boundaries. For example, one would probably find Salman Rushdie's Luka and the Fire of Life, a fantasy novel, shelved with literary fiction (which some argue is a genre in itself, with its own sets of conventions and expectations.) On the other hand, China Mieville's The City and the City, though it centers around a mind-bending premise, does not involve supernatural or science fictional elements, and is more of a crime thriller, is found amongst the science fiction and fantasy. And this has mostly to do with how the previous works of these authors have been marketed.

Fantasy is an integral part of our literary canon, from the earliest stories like the Odyssey, Beowulf, and The Arabian Nights to The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Gulliver's Travels, Frankenstein, The Time Machine, Brave New World, 1984, Slaughterhouse Five, A Handmaid's Tale, The Life of Pi and so many, many more.  It could be said that all fiction is in some sense fantasy, since it is the imagining of things which have not happened. To include heroes, magic, monsters, aliens, strange worlds and technology, imagined futures, does not preclude a work from being literary.

But what does it mean to be literary? Is it an important distinction? Does such a thing even exist, or is it just another manner of arbitrary categorization, a way for elites to feel superior? Can we truly hold up some works as being literary, artistic and meaningful, while relegating others to being pure entertainment? I would argue that you can, but it is certainly not a black and white issue. There is not a line where on one side you have literature and on the other you have pulp. Everything has a degree of literariness and a great deal of subjectivity is involved in making these judgements. But I do think there is a strong objective case to be made for why certain works are superior to others.

The Persistence of Memory - Salvador Dali

Perhaps the one true test of literariness is the test of time - some works persist in our culture and our imaginations and come to be generally accepted as classics or masterpieces. Certainly there are works which may have been considered frivolous entertainments in their time that seem profound and important to us now. Can we know what current works will resonate with future generations? I think we could make some good guesses. But based on what?

Floweriness of prose does not make a thing literary. I think there is a misconception that literariness is somehow tied up with long, convoluted sentence structure, big words, figures of speech and experimental style. I blame James Joyce for this. But one only has to look at Ernest Hemingway, one of the great American novelists, but also the poster-boy for sparse, straight-froward prose style. And you can see a spectrum of writing styles within the fantasy genre itself. Compare the long, multi-clause sentences of Fritz Leiber with tight economical prose of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, for example.

Being literary does not mean being difficult, obscure or inaccessible. But I do think it means being challenging. It means having a certain level of sophistication, complexity, nuance, or subtlety that makes the reader think about aspects of the human experience or question preconceived notions.

The notion of literariness was the principal concern of Russian formalist thinkers. Their answer to what makes a work literary was what they called defamiliarization (or ostranenie, 'making strange.') It is the process by which art and literature slows down our perception of  the familiar, those things that we automatically perceive, those things we take for granted, and thus makes them strange, casts them in a new light.

And here we find the essential difference between genre and literary writing. Genre writing, at the extreme end, aims to be pure entertainment, to be comfortable. It wants to take readers on a thrill ride but not jar them too much. It uses genre conventions as a tool for familiarity. Having the reader linger over a phrase, re-read or stop to think, having the reader "thrown out of the story," is not what the genre writer wants. It is all about momentum and keeping the readers attention (which these days tends to have a very short span) without necessarily connecting or communicating with them.

Now, there is nothing wrong with entertainment. And I believe we should judge books based on what they are, the intentions of the author and the expectations of the audience. But there is absolutely no reason why a book cannot be thought-provoking and entertaining at the same time. In fact, I am not entertained by things which do not engage me intellectually. And I find fantasy and science fiction to be the genre which most captivates my mind because it is so well positioned to make things strange.

On Style

Be clear. Be concise. Omit needless words.
This is the prevailing advice on writing these days. Avoid long sentences and figures of speech. Beware of adverbs. Go light on the exposition. Use modifiers sparingly. Show, don't tell. It is the notion that the author must not intrude, that writing must be like a clear window looking in on the story without being muddied up by flowery language, because language that draws attention to itself draws the reader out of the story. All this advice, however, must be understood as a reaction to bad writing, an attempt to mitigate the textual atrocities committed by fledgling writers.These guidelines promote competent writing, but not great writing, not the impressive and memorable writing that many of us like to read.

Elmore Leonard

Joseph Conrad

Elmore Leonard, in his rules of writing, preaches this invisibility of the author, and famously says, "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it." I get his meaning but surely he understands the irony of what he was saying there. Leonard adds, "Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say." He can't even bother to give us the actual quote, but I'm guessing it is when Conrad said, "Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality." I think this phrase can be interpreted several ways and not necessarily in the way that Leonard does. But it is another staggering irony that he would pick Conrad, an eloquent wordsmith, to try and illustrate his point about authors being invisible. Take for example, this line, picked at random from Heart of Darkness: ""The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver -- over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a sombre gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur." This certainly sounds like writing to me - beautiful writing. Far be it from me, a lowly unpublished writer to disagree with Leonard who has enjoyed such great success, but I do have to wonder if all authors are to be invisible, then what distinguishes one from another? Why should I read an Elmore Leonard novel (I've tried - didn't like it) over some other invisible author? In my mind, authors who attempt to hide, who hold back from being bold and expressive, write boring, unremarkable stories.

Two books on style have shaped my thinking on this subject: Style: An Anti-Textbook by Richard Lanham, and Building Great Sentences by Brooks Landon. In the former, Lanham criticizes the imperative to "be clear." Style should be emphasized over clarity, he maintains. There is little distinction between the idea and the words used to express it. Words are not a window onto something else; it is the words themselves that matter. Lanham says, "People seldom write to be clear. They have designs on their fellow men. Pure prose is as rare as pure virtue, and for the same reasons." Writing is about being persuasive and effective, about achieving a purpose, not about being invisible. Lanham's ultimate message is that writing should be motivated by a sense of play rather than a sense of constraint.

In Building Great Sentences, Brooks Landon teaches us not to be afraid of long sentences. He quotes Ursula K. Le Guin, who wrote, "Teachers trying to get school kids to write clearly, and journalists with their weird rules of writing, have filled a lot of heads with the notion that the only good sentence is a short sentence. This is true for convicted criminals." Landon shows how to build long and interesting sentences, starting with a base clause and adding modifiers and modifying phrases. He acknowledges that a writer must vary sentence length and that short sentences can also be effective. But his emphasis is on the long sentence. Two excellent quotes from educator John Erskine, author of the famous essay The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent, are given as an argument against minimalist writing philosophies. "What you wish to say is found not in the noun," Erskine says, "but in what you add to qualify the noun...The noun, the verb, and the main clause serve merely as a base on which meaning will rise. The modifier is the essential part of any sentence." And also, "When you write, you make a point not by subtracting as though you sharpened a pencil, but by adding. When you put one word after another, your statement should be more precise the more you add. If the result is otherwise, you have added the wrong thing, or you have added more than was needed."

E.B. White

Landon and Lanham both stress that prose is about sound and rhythm, that it is always important to read aloud. E.B. White, who, along with the eminent professor, William Strunk, gave us the imperative to "omit needless words" in the Elements of Style, recognized the importance of sound as well. And he noted that we should be careful about deciding if words are indeed needless or not. He once wrote:

"It comes down to the meaning of ‘needless.’ Often a word can be removed without destroying the structure of a sentence, but that does not necessarily mean that the word is needless or that the sentence has gained by its removal.If you were to put a narrow construction on the word ‘needless,’ you would have to remove tens of thousands of words from Shakespeare, who seldom said anything in six words that could be said in twenty. Writing is not an exercise in excision, it’s a journey into sound. How about ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’? One tomorrow would suffice, but it’s the other two that have made the thing immortal. Thank you, thank you, thank you for your letter."

Even Elmore Leonard makes some concession to 'literary' writing, what he calls "hooptedoodle." That term he took from John Steinbeck, who titled chapters in his novel Sweet Thursday as "Hooptedoodle 1" and "Hooptedoodle 2." These, says Leonard, were warnings to the reader that the author was embarking on literary flights of fancy that had very little to do with the story and could easily be skipped. And despite Leonard's rule to leave out the things that will be skipped by readers, he says of Steinbeck's novel, "Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word."



"

Accounting for Taste

I have long believed that taste, one's aesthetic sense, one's choice in music, literature, art and fashion, is important, that it is not trivial or superficial. I've always struggled to articulate the idea, always wondering how people can like certain things which to me are clearly bad. Are these people deficient in some way? Sure, one can say "chacun son gout (to each his own)" or "there is no accounting for taste," but I've always felt that there is something deeper.  What we like is part of how we define ourselves as individuals. Our tastes are always on display, on our bookshelves, on our walls, in the clothes we wear, and as much of our lives have become digitized, we have our "likes" on our virtual walls, showing to everyone the music, movies and books we love. We say to the world, "This is what I like, therefore this is what I am like."

Like book covers, by which we have been told not to judge the contents, yet nevertheless always and reliably do, we surround and clothe ourselves with outward signs of our inner life. We live in an age of mass marketing and our associations with certain brands and logos are associations with certain values or ideals. It is simply unavoidable, and we, either consciously or not, put our values, or at least our tacit approval of others' values, on display every day.

I'm not talking about such ethical consumer choices where words like fair trade, local or organic might spring up, though, that is an important discussion. I am talking about cultural products. So, while a T-shirt made in a sweatshop in Bangladesh is a material product, weighted with the socioeconomic baggage of globalism, the company putting their logo on these shirts culpable for how it is produced, and that it is something of which we should be aware, I am right now trying to talk about that logo itself, the brand, the ephemeral marker of value, that we in the Western world interact with. And, just like logos on clothing, the music, movies, books and games, those things with which we occupy our imaginations, they too are brands that signify certain values. Certainly "genre" is a type of branding.

Our aesthetic choices say a lot about us, about how we want to be perceived, about our group identification. They can often tells us a lot about our personalities. A person's musical preferences, for example, can be predicted by how they score on a test of the Big Five personality traits, which are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism.Openness to experience has the highest predictive factor, showing that people who rate high in this category tend to like more complex and/or novel music. Those who are open to experience show curiosity, appreciation of art, and unusual ideas. At the same time, openness is also strongly correlated with liberal ethics, such as racial tolerance.

Stephen Harper

This is the point I want to come to: our aesthetics are political. Someone once told me that he had found a new appreciation for country music because he realized how political it is. Of course it is. It represents the values of a large segment of (mostly white, conservative) North America. My problem with it, with the so-called "new" country, is that it sells values like authenticity, small town pride and moral simplicity in a very deliberate and inauthentic way. It is to me as inauthentic and misleading as FOX News, the GOP and Canada's own Conservative Party.  Those who score high in the personality category of neuroticism, which is the tendency toward negative emotion, generally prefer conventional music like country music. At the same it has been shown that conservatives are much more sensitive to feelings of disgust, so maybe there is some correlation there. But regardless of my liberal bias against country music, it certainly cannot be said that it is any more political than say hip-hop or punk.

Robin Thicke and Miley Cyrus

But even that which seems apolitical is in fact not. Much of popular culture, especially music, is directed towards younger audiences and much of it reaffirms mindless capitalist consumption, sex, drinking, white privilege and hetero-normative stereotypes. In games and action movies we see the glorification of violence and the military. In fiction, we find stories that are purely escapist, which do not challenge our thinking or engage us morally, as good literature should. The seemingly apolitical nature of much our culture is in fact very political when it reaffirms the status-quo. And so, our aesthetic sensibilities are not superficial, even if what we like sometimes tends to be superficial. Our vision of how the world is and how it ought to is both a political and aesthetic one.

My point is that we must not be content only with what is sold to us on TV, in movies, magazines and on the radio, with what is popular, with what is spoon-fed to us. We are all cultural antennae and we have a choice of what we tune into. We must dig and sift to find art that is meaningful, important. Taste matters.

My Bias

David Gilmour

Last year, David Gilmour, Canadian author and a lecturer at the University of Toronto, stirred up  controversy when he proclaimed his preference for heterosexual, white, male authors.  Gilmour said, "I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately none of those happen to be Chinese or women." He said, "what I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth.”

Virginia Woolf

He did make an exception for Virginia Woolf, and he considered her to be too sophisticated for a third-year class. And in the same interview he did start out talking about his love of Proust, a homosexual writer. In a later interview, he explained that he was not saying that men are better writers than women. "Writers like Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro – these are top-flight international writers. It’s just that I don’t connect with the material as profoundly as I do with, say, Phillip Roth’s The Dying Animal." Also, as a visiting lecturer, and not an actual member of the U of T English department, he perhaps has a little more latitude to focus his classes on only those authors which he personally enjoys.

I understand the backlash against Gilmour's remarks. Teachers of literature should be exposing students to a broad and diverse range authors. It is important for minority voices to be heard, for the experiences of non-privileged groups to be read and explored, for them to be a part of our discourse. Literature is, in part, about exploring other lives and perspectives. Reading only the works produced by one group of people is close-minded and limiting.

But I also understand where Gilmour is coming from.  He is not being a bigot. He is simply identifying those authors with which he has a deep connection.  In my recent post about my influences there is a definite lack of diversity. The authors I mention are all pretty much white, heterosexual males. I am biased. I am more interested in reading authors who I identify with, whose voices resonate with me.  With music and movies I have the same bias. I generally prefer male singers and male actors.

Monty Python

It is most pronounced with comedy.  There are some very funny women out there, but no female comic has ever made me laugh uncontrollably, has ever transported me to that sublime level of mirth. This is something I have no control over. I identify with a male sensibility. I cannot help what I am drawn to, what pulls me in, what intrigues me, what amuses me. And I am not ashamed of that.

However, I accept that I should expand my horizons, step out of my comfort zone a little more. As a reader, and as a writer, perhaps I should be more open to other voices and actively seek them out. When looking for a book to read, I do not consider the gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation of the author (certainly the latter is probably unknown in most cases.) I do not feel that I am prejudiced against women or minority writers. But in all honesty, I am probably more likely to pick up a book if the author's name is male. So, as someone who believes in equality and who considers himself to be progressive and intellectual, is it incumbent on me to incorporate a kind of affirmative action into how I choose what to read?

I don't want to fall into the trap of tokenism and First-World guilt, where I read certain books just to prove that I am an open-minded, progressive intellectual. I started reading Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes, and it just didn't draw me in at all. I'm sure it is a wonderful book but I put it down. My wife picked it up and she couldn't put it down. She loved it, and this sort of confirmed my suspicion that it just wasn't for me - our tastes are extremely divergent. One of her favourite books is The Birth House by Ami McKay, a story about midwives in Nova Scotia during WWI. It's a well-reviewed book; I haven't read it and neither do I want to. It just doesn't interest me. Of course, both of these books are historical fiction. I should be talking about women and minority writers in sci-fi/fantasy, the genre I am most interested in.

I can say that one of my favourite fantasy books of all time was written by a woman and features a strong female protagonist: The Deed of Paksenarrion,by Elizabeth Moon. I've read and enjoyed Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series. I've picked up and put down books by Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. LeGuin, Robin Hobb and others. I'm not sure what is was that I didn't like about these authors. Maybe, as is often the case with me, it was just timing. I've certainly had the same experience with just as many, if not more, books written by men.

As for minority writers, I would certainly consider Salman Rushdie, another one of my favourites, to be non-white. (I don't even consider myself to be white, as a person of Coloured South African descent. But having grown up as a Canadian in a very white suburb, I do have a white sensibility. Nevertheless, I do feel that I can identify with non-whites.) The book I am currently reading is called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Asian American writer Charles Yu. So, maybe I'm not doing so badly. Of course, I don't want to sound like the classic bigot who says, "Well, some of my best friends are [insert name of minority group.]"

Anyway, I have identified my bias and though I'm not ashamed of it, I will try to mitigate it. I do not want it to keep me from great stories that were perhaps not written by white, heterosexual males. I am open to suggestions.

How I Quit Smoking

I have been smoking for half my life.  And it's no wonder that I took it up.  I grew up with it.  My mom smoked in the house, in the car, in bed.  She would write a note and send me to pick up cigarettes for her at the corner store.  My brothers both took up smoking at a young age and they did the same thing.  The convenience store wouldn't sell cigarettes to teenagers, but they would to me, a kid with a note.  When mom wasn't home, my brothers would have friends over and they'd all be smoking.  How could I not become a smoker, too?

I didn't take up smoking until I was about 18-years-old, though. Up to that point, I think my mom was always proud that I hadn't started and figured that I never would.  And to this day, she's still under the same illusion - unless my brothers have told her and she hasn't said anything.  But I've hidden it from her for the past eighteen years.  I didn't want to disappoint her.  Surely, she would blame herself, and perhaps that's why I felt the need to maintain the illusion.

Supergrass

But I loved smoking.  It was a social activity - drinking and smoking - just like in the song Alright by Supergrass: We wake up, we go out / smoke a fag, put it out/ see our friends, see the sights/ feel alright.  I thought it was cool, rebellious, dark and mysterious.  Weren't all the interesting, intelligent, artistic people smokers?

Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, Kurt Cobain, Lou Reed, Joe Strummer, Ian Curtis

More than anything I began to equate smoking with writing.  I remember one tobacco-fueled all-nighter in university, as I was putting together a last minute philosophy essay, I thought to myself how wonderful cigarettes were.  They kept me company and kept me going.  They helped me concentrate.  I thought at that moment that if I will be a writer then I will need to smoke.  When thoughts of quitting entered my mind I always returned to thinking about writing and how I needed cigarettes to do it.  It's one of the reasons I chose the picture of Aldous Huxley smoking as my profile pic.   

Aldous Huxley

I've chosen a different photo of Huxley without the cigarette for my profile now. 

It's because I've quit.

Yes, it's true. Non-smokers will congratulate me, but I don't need the accolades. Smokers will wish me good luck, but their doubts don't bother me. It's different this time.  It has nothing to do with luck.  I have tried at least once before to quit.  But my heart wasn't in it then. I was still clinging to the notion that it was enjoyable and that as an interesting, artistic person I needed cigarettes. Stupid, I know. But these are the illusions that smokers cling to.

It hasn't been long, only 10 days so far, so we'll see if it sticks.  But I really do feel like I've kicked it. How? Well,  I woke up on September 13th, a Saturday like any other, and just decided that I didn't want to do it anymore. It's not about cigarettes killing me.  It's not about those horrible pictures of diseased hearts, tracheotomies and oral cancer they put on the packs. Non-smokers die too.  It's simply about quality of life. It costs too much money. And for what?  To make myself feel like crap?  So I can get winded after running only a few seconds?  So I can't keep up with my kids?  I realized that I hated feeling like a slave to this habit that gives me nothing in return.  They don't relax me.  In fact, I feel less grumpy now that I've quit.  They don't aid concentration.  I can write without cigarettes.  I'm doing it now.  And I don't have the distraction of wanting to go outside for one. 

Is it really that easy? You can just decide to stop? Well, yes. I was never a heavy smoker, (half-pack a day) so the level of my addiction may not be that deep. But I think any smoker could do the same thing.  I had a little help from Allen Carr, but I mostly came to these realizations myself.  You can't quit smoking if you still regard it as a source of pleasure.  You won't be able to quit if you foresee it being a massive feat of willpower, trying to stay away from the thing you love and want. If that's the case, you will go running back.  You can only quit if you change your perception of smoking. It's a trap. It gives you nothing. It puts your money into the hands of corporations whose only service to you is to shorten your life-expectancy and make you feel perpetually gloomy and unhealthy. Smoking is gross, not romantic. It's foolish, not intelligent.

Leonard Cohen

They say ex-smokers still crave cigarettes every day for the rest of their life. I don't know if this is true.  I have had only a few cravings, but nothing too serious so far.  The thought of smoking actually repels me right now.  It is interesting that Leonard Cohen, who quit smoking in his fifties, has just recently, and quite deliberately, decided to start smoking again at the age of 80.  I guess he has held onto his love for smoking even after almost 30 years of abstaining.  Now that he is an octogenarian, I guess he doesn't feel he needs to worry about his future so much. Well, good for him I suppose. Maybe if I live to 80 I will look at cigarettes in the way that I used to - as props and aids for the deep and complex philosopher, artist, musician and writer.  But for now, no thanks.

Update: 5 years later I am still smoking. I thought I had quit when I wrote this, but I was a fool.

My Influences.

What authors do I consider to be my influences?  I've given it a lot of thought.  These are the one's that grabbed me by the brain as a child, and as a young adult, and have yet to let go.  They have shaped my thinking, my perception of the world, and are direct influences on the novel I am currently writing.

I have to admit that most of my influences trickled down from my brother, who was seven years older than me.  It was his books that I picked up, for the most part.

However, the first book I bought on my own, at a book fair in elementary school, was The Forest of Doom, by Ian Livingstone.  It was the third book of the Fighting Fantasy series, which was also co-written by Steve Jackson.  They were a "choose-your-own-adventure" sort of book, except that it also incorporated dice rolling and keeping track of stats on a piece of paper.  I went on to buy more and more of these books.  I was already familiar with Dungeons & Dragons through my older brother, and I would eventually shelve the juvenile Fighting Fantasy books, and pick up a Player's Handbook and a Dungeon Master's Guide (so perhaps I should also mention Gary Gygax as an influence,) but these books were mine, my first real independent reading.  They were my first portal into the fantasy realm.  My imagination was stimulated.

Next came JRR Tolkien.  I read The Hobbit when I was twelve and The Lord of the Rings shortly thereafter.  I reread Lord of the Rings at least twice.  I was captivated by Tolkien's descriptive ability: the strange lands and far-off kingdoms, magical creatures, brave warriors.  But truly it was Frodo's journey, his struggle, his relationship Gollum and the stalwart friendship of Sam Gamgee that stuck with me most.

Fritz Leiber must stand as my all-time favourite for his stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.  I have a ripped, torn and beaten copy of Swords Against Death which is like an old friend to me.  I have reread that more times than I can count. I read him now and see that he writes in a style that no-one would dare try in this day and age.  But to me it is magnificent prose.  And the camaraderie between the two heroes, like Sam and Frodo's, is an ideal of male friendship. It is competitive and not always necessarily 'friendly' but in times of danger their deep connection always remains strong.  They share an unspoken sense of loyalty to one another.

This theme of male friendship is also found Arthur Conan Doyle's stories of Sherlock Holmes as told by his loyal companion Dr. John Watson. I have read every one of his adventures.  The eccentric, unfathomably intelligent detective is a unique and timeless hero.  It was one of Watson's declarations that inspired the book I am writing.  He said, "Holmes, you are a wizard!"  And I thought, "What if he was a wizard?"  Thus was born Melhos Locke ("Melhos" an anagram of Holmes, and "Locke" a play on Sherlock.)  I've wondered if this is too obvious.  Edgar Allen Poe's story The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and others are also, for obvious reasons, influential.

Though, I never left fantasy behind, I did start picking up some of my brother's other books.  And what's next for the angsty teen...Existentialism!  Albert Camus' The Outsider and The Plague, Fyodor Dostoevky's Crime and Punishment, Franz Kafka's, The Trial.  I gobbled up these tales about futility and the absurdity of existence.  

Then I discovered the likes of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, fantasists,  fabulists of the highest order who remake reality and seemingly broaden the horizon of what's possible, including what's possible in writing
.  Reading these authors I am always filled with a sense of awe and wonder.

I should include George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's  Brave New World, two distinct visions of a dystopic future both of which still seem highly plausible.  In fact, the latter seems highly prescient looking around at our world today and is part of the reason why I use Huxley's picture as my profile pic (also because my middle name is Huxley.)

It was Plato's Allegory of the Cave in The Republic which got me interested in philosophy, made me yearn to learn higher concepts instead of being figuratively chained to the wall and forced to watch shadows.  So I studied philosophy in university and have many favourite philosophers.  But it is perhaps Friedrich Nietzsche that I loved the most.  His philosophy is often misunderstood, and perhaps I don't fully understand it myself, but I find it to be rebellious, joyous (gay in the old sense of the word) and poetic.

And speaking of poetry, perhaps I will mention a few poets.  I am in no way inclined toward writing poetry and I have a hard time 'getting' it, even though I understand that the whole notion of 'getting' poetry is not the way to approach it.  I see it as an art-form that I am out of my depth in.  Still, I know what I like.  I was once given a book of American poetry by a friend and I fell in love with Walt Whitman, e.e. cummings, Carl Sandburg among others.  But perhaps most influential on me was a Canadian-Hungarian poet named Robert Zend and his book called Oab.  It is an experimental type poem-story where the actual letters (oab) come to life and have adventures on the page (a typesetter's nightmare, I'm sure.)   I took from it a sense of joy in writing and that what we write, what we create, are not static things.

And so there you have it.  These are the core ingredients that have contributed to the formation of this interesting wizard.


 

On Originality

Qedipus at Colonnus

Some say originality in fiction is no longer possible.  When did this happen?  When did we exhaust the creative potential of humanity to tell new stories? Did originality begin and end with the ancients, and has everything since simply been imitation and variation on theme?  Looking at Hollywood, which now seems to only churn out remakes, adaptations, sequels and reboots, one definitely gets the sense that our collective imagination is bankrupt, that there are no fresh new ideas. 

There are no new stories. 

Of course, this is bullshit. Exciting new stories are created and told every day.  The glut of derivative and unoriginal books, film and music comes not from unimaginative artists but from cautious and/or savvy business people who market those things that are safe, unoffensive, familiar.  It is easy to despair of the current state of music, for example, by listening to top 40 radio which is filled with adolescent pabulum.  (I know this is a generational issue - popular music has always been made by young people for young people - but still, Katy Perry and Taylor Swift will not one day be considered original or influential.)  But if you look, or listen rather, just beyond the threshold of the mainstream, you will find music that is actually good, that is authentic and original.  The same goes for movies and novels. 

It has become a something of a platitude to say that there are only a limited number of stories that can be told.  Joseph Campbell famously wrote about the monomyth, the hero's journey, the basic structure of almost all traditional stories.  Under Campbell's influence, Christopher Booker wrote in 2004 that there are seven basic plots: overcoming the monster, rags to riches, the quest, voyage and return, tragedy, comedy, and rebirth.  This idea has taken root and is oft repeated to say that originality is either impossible or that it is not that important.  The consequence of this line of thinking, as critics of Booker have pointed out, is that it sets up a criteria for art wherein those works that adhere closely to the archetype are praised and those that deviate are seen as flawed.  Crocodile Dundee and E.T. are praised over the works of Kafka and Joyce.

It may be true that the stories we tell are based on a limited number of archetypes, but that does not preclude originality, which is not about telling a story that is absolutely new or creating something out of nothing.  Aside from being impossible, such a thing would be alien and incomprehensible.  Everything comes from something else.  Having sources, influences, and precursors does not make a story unoriginal.  Originality is about drawing from various and often disparate influences and combining them in new and interesting ways.  As American novelist Edith Wharton said, "True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision."

This is the tricky part.  In his introduction to Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast series, fantasy books widely regarded as being very original, Quentin Crisp says that being original is not about looking left and right at your neighbor's garden paths, seeing that one is perpendicular and the other parallel, then making your own diagonal.  It is not about taking something you like and just putting a superficial spin on it.  You don't take inspiration from Hellboy and decide you will make Heavengirl, or take Lord of the Rings and make Master of the Squares.  It is about creating something that is truly your own.

Author Stephen James said "Originality does not consist in saying what no one has said before but in saying exactly what you think yourself."  This is important.  Originality in art is more about authenticity, your unique voice.  The original work of art does not have to be something radically different but it must offer a unique perspective.  

Alice in Wonderland

How does one create original work?  Unfortunately there is no "how to."  Originality is a matter of imagination, mental flexibility and authenticity.   Read and travel widely.  Open your mind.  Pay attention to your dreams.  Take hallucinogenic drugs, if you want - I recommend psilocybin mushrooms.  But again, originality does not have to mean crazy or bizarre.  It can be small things.  I think it's the details that make all the difference.  And stories are not just about plot.  An author may find their originality in character, setting, concept or execution.   

It is okay to imitate authors you like, but eventually you must find your own voice, your own ideas, your own combination of the elements that constitute the craft.  Imitations are essentially inauthentic.  For me, originality is perhaps the most important quality of any work, but especially in SF/F, where the whole point is to imagine different worlds and different people.