Genre & Criticism

Most days this past week, I have woken up with an achey, throbbing ear. This is not ideal for someone who has to listen to phone calls all day for work! So that’s fun.

I am currently reading Play of Shadows by Sebastien de Castell, and in Assassin’s Creed II I got to the Bonfire of the Vanities. Hopefully, I’ll get to writing those Sea of Monsters annotations, though having recently re-read The Patriot Witch, that book would also be a good one for annotations?

Had the strangest urge to write poetry Friday morning…

Genre & Criticism

I went to a writers’ workshop a couple of weeks ago, and one thing that came up was that when reading someone’s work, or taking someone’s criticism into consideration, genre is something you should have in mind. You should want your readers to know what it is you’re trying to do, after all, which might not happen if they’re not familiar with the genre in question.

It reminded me of workshop days as an undiegrad, where very often, my classmates would submit the first chapter or two of a fantasy, science-fiction, or mystery novel, and the consensus often turned out to be, “Make things clearer. We need more hints.” We wanted more information, and to get a better idea of what was going on in the constructed world that the author was building.

And, uh…

Look, that was a great class and that was a great professor, but for a lot of genre fiction, this simply does not work. There are many genres and formats where the entire style insists on stringing people along for much longer, teaching clues for chapters upon chapters. It’s true that you have to hook people fast; that being said, in certain genres, and expectations are that if you’re a fan of this or that genre, you will be hooked by certain things that might not be draws for fans of other genres.

Not every genre is for everyone–I get that! You are going to run into medium and genre conventions that you won’t like. That’s part of life. I know a lot of people don’t like anime, because there are certain aspects of the storytelling that they don’t jive with. The same with fantasy, science-fiction, horror, or whatever. But when you’re going to seriously criticize something, or even analyze it, you need to be aware of the tropes and tools of the genre in question.

Sometimes I flashback to that course I took in grad school, in which we read a book that was a ghost story, but for the actual class discussion, we never actually talked about it as a ghost story. We kept digging into metaphor and politics and such, which isn’t useless; however, it seemed to me like we were missing the forest for the trees, talking about how the story was about a haunted house.

[Then again, this was also the class where we covered one book, Martin Amis’s Dead Babies, and the professor had no clue that it was meant to be a parody of Agatha Christie. That’s one of the first things described on the book’s Wikipedia page, by the way.]

If you are trying to take advice from someone about your writing, and they say, “I don’t get this–there are a lot of nonhuman characters, and magic isn’t real, so it’s unrealistic,” you should rightfully point out that, for a fantasy story, that’s crap criticism! (Although maybe phrase it tactfully.) This person is apparently unused to fantasy fiction. Being unfamiliar with a genre doesn’t mean that your criticism is useless, though–you can criticize things like character development and Plot, as those are things that still need to make sense. If those elements are off, then you can say so.

It is important, though, to have criticism from people who actually know what the genre is like. They should be able to point out if you’re doing justice to the story that you’re trying to tell.

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