This is an idea I presented to the one and only writer’s workshop that I’ve completed. I was commenting on a young man’s steampunk story that he had submitted to the class. I must have been in “the zone” during my impromptu speech, because when I finished articulating my point a round of applause from the class took me by surprise.
I think this means one of two things: either A) I have a very big head and the reports of clapping are greatly exaggerated, or B) a lot of young writers in my generation love fantasy/sci-fi and have cut their teeth on it their entire lives, they just have trouble writing it well.
Backing up to the beginning of that influential pass/fail creative writing course, on syllabus day the teacher led us through a passage which read something to the effect of “you WILL NOT submit sci-fi or fantasy stories of any kind.” I later learned this was getting off easy, as the next year’s workshop that I started and subsequently quit had a syllabus passage that read “you will not submit any fiction that begins: He was the son of Darathor the Mighty, King of the Elven Lands,” or some such derogatory warning. Naturally, I took it as a challenge.
As a class, we were able to persuade our teacher to allow sci-fi/fantasy short stories, on the condition that he would be merciless with them. And to my surprise, in a setting I thought would be full of snobby literary hipsters dressed all in black who would snap their fingers after each reading, about half of the submissions were in some way fantastical or magical. Both of mine were.
And about halfway through the semester, everyone had a workshopped story under their belts, and we sat in our circle of desks and picked apart the young man’s steampunk story. I remember the setting clearly: a sea of clouds, floating continents and islands, and steam-powered airships that sailed the skies. I remember the characters only in that the protagonist was a young male who worked as a postman, who sailed a small ship between the islands delivering packages for a stern boss who had a pretty daughter. The plot I do not remember at all, and therein lies the point that I spent several minutes presenting to the class. The writer had spent nearly all of his page count describing a beautiful world, with nothing in it.
Those weren’t the words I used then, as I was careful not to hurt his feelings since he was rather shy, earnest, and after all I didn’t want to discourage him from writing. The story he’d written wasn’t really a story, it was just a setting. He had exhausted himself creating the islands and the ships that didn’t exist, and was spent by the time he got to the actual story, the characters. The summation of my point as closely as I can remember it was this: realistic fiction is about events that may happen, and fantasy is about events that will never happen. Fiction writers get a head start by using a world that already exists. Fantasy writers have to do double duty by first creating a new world that makes sense, make it make sense to the reader, and then populate it with characters who play out a story. Many undertakers of a more fantastic story just don’t make it to that last step, or when they do, significantly less time and energy is left to spend there.
And this is why workshop syllabi contain these rude warnings. Writers, especially new ones, are entranced by the idea of writing in the genre they love most, but don’t realize how daunting a task it really is. So workshop leaders end up with piles of settings, devoid of any real story. It didn’t stop at the steampunk story in the case of my class. Both before and after the story in question had come up, we were encountered with stories about swamp demons, ice queens, zombie apocalypses, and medieval towns being attacked by barbarians. Many of which, though not all, turned out in the same fashion as the steampunk story.
So it’s easy to see why teachers learn to view fantasy as bad, when the truth is that fantasy is hard. If you’re someone with a powerful enough imagination to get interested in writing fantasy, let alone writing, it really is hard to put the “boring” parts of a story first and focus on the characters. You want to write more about the way the frost-enchanted sword shimmers, about the repulsor system that keeps the starship aloft in gravity. It’s a little easier to take the magical-realism route, to use smaller pops of fantasy in an otherwise realistic setting, which is the approach I took with both of my stories for the workshop. But in essence, isn’t it all really just fantasy on the same spectrum? A scale with stories that end up in the sci-fi section of the bookstore like Rocannon’s World at one end, stories with a completely fabricated planet, species, and language for setting, and at the other, something that ends up in the literature section like The Metamorphosis where the fantasy is limited to just one splash, what if a man woke up and was a giant roach?
Both of those stories are inarguably fantastical in nature. And yet they end up as different genres. I think the deciding factor is the amount of world building done. Kafka spent more time on stream of consciousness and LeGuin spent more time on entire societies. Both are well written stories, but clearly there is a bias that stories about new worlds are more often considered “something else” besides literature. I know that marketing is a large part of where things are shelved, but I can’t help but feel like a lot of people like my writing teachers are missing out on a lot of good stories sitting in the sci-fi/fantasy section because they only subscribe to “literary fiction.” Books like Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant feature excellently written characters and plots, as well as monsters. The key for both of those stories’ success is that the focus is put on the former, not the latter.
So the point is, don’t scrap your alternate history-WWII-elven-mecha-pilot story, just spend an equal amount of time making that elf-pilot as believable and human as you can. Make him change, make him feel something, and you’ll have a story worth reading. And send me a draft, because it sounds pretty awesome.
Bonus: Some further reading on genre from the same two authors mentioned above http://www.newstatesman.com/2015/05/neil-gaiman-kazuo-ishiguro-interview-literature-genre-machines-can-toil-they-can-t-imagine
Image Credit: http://snowskadi.deviantart.com/
Image Credit: http://snowskadi.deviantart.com/
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