Losing Everything

I've noticed that one of the things I like to do in my stories is have my characters lose everything that matters to them and then see what it turns them into. Everyone will react differently. In fact, in my 2YN series I have two characters who come from very similar backgrounds, but who react to their respective crises in completely opposite ways.

I think that's why I like designing this post-apocalyptic world. In this world, the whole world is in the position of having lost everything. And there's such a range of reactions to play with. In this world I'm designing, I get to explore this fascination of mine fully - and that's always good for a writing project.

How Much is Significant?

While doing research for my 2YN-class novel, I came across this sentence:

"Illness becomes increasingly severe, and significant mortality sets in."

... Significant mortality? How much mortality has to set in before it's significant? What happens if an insignificant amount of mortality sets in?

I know from the context that what they meant is that a significant percentage of people will die. But it made me giggle nonetheless.

Unoriginal Sins

"Unoriginal Sins," a New York Times article by Whitney Otto about the Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism scandal, begins like this:

The beach book, the novel that we take with us on a languorous summer vacation, when we demand that reading be a pleasure and not a chore, the one "serious" readers apologize for even though they shouldn't, is known more formally as genre fiction. The thing that makes genre fiction so appealing is the exact same thing that can make it such a bore: it's predictable. If the recent rash of novels classified as chick lit were laid end to end, you would have the literary equivalent of a tract-house development.

Sure, some of the houses are beige and others are cream, but they all have the same two-car garage, great room and marble counters in the kitchen. That's why people buy them.

The article goes on to explain that Kaavya Viswanathan can be excused for her plagiarism because all the books in that genre are so similar anyway - and that people are most likely to write genre fiction if they are motivated more by the prestige of being a writer than the actual act of writing.

I don't write literary fiction. I write genre fiction - most often urban fantasy, and variants thereof. But I certainly don't strive to make my books like every other book in the genre. If writing genre fiction means your books must look just like all the other books in the genre, then I should just get out now, because I'm never going to succeed at that.

Awhile ago, I was told by a literary-writer friend of mine that one of the differences between genre fiction and literary fiction is that literary fiction values originality and creativity. She didn't actually mean it as an insult, but I found it a rather strange statement to make. Aren't originality and creativity valued in all forms of fiction? I didn't understand then, and don't understand now, the idea that predictability is more highly valued in genre fiction than creativity.

I also find it strange that while people who write anything besides literary fiction are supposedly only doing it because they want fame and prestige and don't care about the writing itself, so many of them continue to do it even after years of not getting published.

But I do find it telling that the people who make these statements about genre fiction aren't the people who write it.

Book vs. Author, Again

On her blog, Holly Lisle posted a link to a letter supporting the Iraq war. In her post, she says some people may stop reading her blog and buying her books because they disagree with what this letter says. It's certainly not something I would do. I don't agree with what the letter says, but that has nothing to do with my opinion of Holly's writing - or my opinion of Holly herself. I like her, I like her blog, and I like her books, and I'm not going to deprive myself of them because I don't agree with her politics.

But would other people really turn against an author because they have different views? I talked about this in an earlier post. People want the authors they like to be just like them, and when it turns out they're not, they feel betrayed. But nobody is going to be exactly like you. Even if an author writes a book that perfectly describes how you see the world, and that touches the deepest part of your soul, the author is not going to be just like you, and might be very different. So does that mean that you shouldn't like the book anymore, or that it loses its hold on you? I don't think it should.

Everyone, I think, wants to find people like themselves. Life is a long search for connection. In books we sometimes find these connections. But a book is different from the person who wrote it, and sometimes it's hard to remember that. The author who wrote a book that touches you could write a book next year that repulses you. I write about characters who have traits in common with me; I also write about characters who are very different from me. I write from the perspective of my own worldview, but that doesn't exclude the possibility that someone with a completely different worldview will read something I've written and be touched deeply by it.