The Heart of Fiction: The Bleaks and all the rest!
I was originally going to call this the Bleaks but I have amended it to included the bleak and the miscellaneous.
The bleaks are all the awful things that can happen that are not quite covered.
As a note: One of my pet peeves is when someone asks me to read something for them and they don’t even know the difference between dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction.
Now they do have some overlap and there are some ways that they can intersect but first and foremost know what you are presenting.
Post-Apocalyptic fiction means after something bad happened then this happened.
Dystopian fiction happens where a society pretends to be good or pretends to be a utopia of some sort but is really twisting a Snidely Whiplash mustache in the background while the rich dine on caviar and watch the poor people fight over the last scrap of two-ply toilet paper or the last apple. Its a society that is really abusive and evil but that pretends that all its excess and debauchery is really for the good of the people. We are actually a Utopia “Trust Me”! (Spoiler Alert: Don’t trust them!) They are merely pretending to be good when in reality they are corrupt and bad.
Can an apocalyptic event that causes mankind to have to rebuild society cause a dystopia to form where the dictators are power hungry lunatics ready to be toppled by a brassy teen-aged girl with two boyfriends and an attitude problem? Absolutely but it starts somewhere. As an unrelated example, The Hunger Games is a great example of Dystopian fantasy kicked off by a world-ending event causing a power shift.
But wait! I didn’t mention Romance!
In my opinion, not a genre. (Let loose the hate mail! But hear me out first)
Well, it is a genre but I believe that as a genre of fiction its a damn flat genre by itself and in severe need of an overhaul by definition. Romance, according to the Romance Writers of America, is defined as romantic love between two people and it has to have “an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending.” For all the things love can be, for all the stories authors can tell, that is a devastatingly narrow definition.
Don’t get me wrong, its an industry worth eleventy-billion dollars but I have never found a romance that was just a romance that I found worth reading.
Love stories rarely exist within a vacuum. I love my husband more than I can say. Yet there is still battles over unmade beds, political discussions, intrigue over stolen Monets (wait…). When romance exists inside a vacuum there is very little outside of the characters involved and therefore little for them to actually do. Once the author and the reader explore what they like, what scares them, their emotional barriers, their hang-ups and their fetishes there is nowhere else to go.
Give me an amazing romance that takes place within a dystopian struggle for survival. Give me two people struggling to love one another in a historic setting that is not compatible for their love; give me two completely different species embroiled in civil war trying to make life better for others and trying to cross class barriers while learning to trust one another- give me more to read than just porn on a page. Give me three people in a polyamorous relationship that is actually about more than sex but about love. Give me romances about people that are finding themselves and the people they love. Let them discover and redefine gender, sexuality and love. Help us see love and “hope” and how we define “emotionally satisfying” in a new way and I will read them all day long! Happily and with great gusto but give me more than two individuals that just meet and fall in love. Life is NEVER that simple. If so, I want a do-over. My life has never been simple, joyous yes, simple no.
Literature is art and art is a reflection of all that is beautiful and wonderful and frightening and terrible in real life. It is beautiful. It is messy. It is frightening. So is love. But life and love never exist within a vacuum. Please do not try to feed it to me that way.
The Miscellaneous In Spec Fic
Alt-History- What if this happened instead?
Kaiju- Giant Monster, Run for your life! How did it come to be? How can we defeat it? Why is it eating our city?
Slipstream- Its just damn weird! Nothing is what we think it is and it can be extremely successful but is often just damn weird. Its generally hit or miss. One awesome, successful example of this was “Fight Club”. Movie was good, the book was mind-blowing!
Lovecraftian- Mythos and Alternate worlds. Kinda Horror, kinda scifi, kinda fantasy, really anything goes!
Cli-Fi- Climate Fiction: Climate change based The Day After Tomorrow (Its like near SciFi and Alt-History had a baby and its sad and scary and glorious all at once.
Mystery/ Thriller- Who did it? Why? What did they gain? The heart of their piece is what’s at the heart of a good book report, who, what, where, when, why, how? The trick is to keep the reader guessing until the last minute. Throw in red herrings, bury those seeds of truth so deeply that when they finally bear fruit the audience is rewarded for a job well done. The cardinal sin here is leading them around by the nose. They are readers not puppies on a chain. Respect them with a clever plot. Come up with a great one. Then call that your red herring. Revise it and it is fishy number two. No matter how clever you think you are, reverse and go another way- thinking you’re too clever is how serial killers get caught.
AHHH THERE ARE MANY MORE GENRES ARE YOU LOOKING AT MORE?
Nope! I write SpecFic, that’s speculative fiction for those of you who like your words all fancified and spelled out. I was merely looking into what I consider the heart of those genres or subgenres. The fact is, there are too many genres of amazing writing out there to list them all or to do justice to them all. Because speculative fiction is what I write and most of what I read, that is where I focused my efforts. Hopefully this helped someone. I know it helps me to try to understand what is at the heart or what should be at the heart of the story I am trying to tell. It keeps it on track.
Why fit into a Genre at all?
Many authors have a desire to become published authors. Unless you are going to strictly self-published route you will have to partner with someone to help you sell your masterpiece. An agent or publishing house needs to know where to sell your amazing work. If they can’t label it then they cannot sell it. If they cannot sell it they can’t make any money off of it and if they cannot make any money off of it then they won’t touch it.
Cross-Genre is awesome, genre-resistant is permissible. Genre-refusal is just arrogant. If you don’t fit into a genre either you don’t understand your genre(s) or your work is under developed. Take another look.
It is hard to force your piece of art into a box and yet its part of the rules.
I am currently on submission for a book I wrote. It is my baby and you won’t believe the feedback I have received.
Its bad business to post the most amazingly striking (good and bad) feedback I have gotten but let’s just leave it at this, careful genre research is your friend.
And tell anyone who will listen that you want, no you demand,
Canithrope: A Steampulp Love Story
A Victorian Apothecary and her shifter companion set off to cure a magical malady and end up saving London from a mad scientist attempting to harness ancient magics capable of remaking men into monsters.
www.vrobertsononline.com.
